Waktu yang diam-diam berlalu; tiada pernah dicanangkan. Mungkin oleh sekalian orang, tetapi tidak waktu itu sendiri. Kata orang, mereka yang tertinggal oleh waktu tidak mungkin lagi bersama-sama kita--di ketika ini, atau di hadapan. Dan kehilangan waktu turut mengusung beban masa lalu yang tak terungkap. "Bagaimana pula dengan mereka yang ditelan waktu?", tanyamu. "Mereka itu", jawab si tua, " ialah orang-orang yang hanya mampu menemukan dirinya lewat persinggungan dengan tempat-tempat yang menyimpan waktu-yang-abadi."

Dalam redup matamu:

yang sayu;

yang tiada rasa;

yang tersinggung oleh waktu

Tapi masih menyimpan bara;

hangat masa lampau yang makin pudar

Tapi masih bersinar terang;

beransur malap, bagai bulan dikejar awan

Aku jadi galau

serigalamu seakan mahu menerpa.

Siapa gerangan empunya

bibirmu yang mekar membunga suria;

tiada teduh

hangat.

Dan senyum di ekor matamu?

2020

Amat jarang sekali (jujurnya tak pernah berlaku) untuk saya menyelesaikan sesebuah tulisan baik dalam apa bentukpun. Pertamanya, kerana saya fikir tidak ada keperluan untuk diselesaikan tulisan itu. Boleh jadi, sudah ada orang yang menulisnya. Atau tentu saja, ia tidak cukup memuaskan hati. Selalunya, yang kedua.

Saya secara diam-diam kagum dengan mereka yang ada keupayaan untuk menyiapkan apa yang dimulakan. Sudah tentu dalam hal ini ia merujuk kepada pertukangan kata. Bahkan, lebih kagum dengan mereka yang begitu berani menerbitkan tulisannya atas nama sendiri. Itu sebuah tanggungjawab yang jarang-jarang diperkirakan; macam orang politik berebut nak jadi YB.

Tidak ada apa yang hendak dituliskan di sini. Ya, masalah besar bagi saya ialah ada terlalu banyak resah sampaikan tidak tahu ke mana ia hendak disalurkan, atau apa yang hendak diceritakan.

Cuma memberi khabar dan menambah sisipan 2020 di tepi laman.

the purest instinct

It is not the self that changes; the similar, the unique.

The self is not something that requires others to acknowledge its identity. Self-identity is a mixture, a blend, of the many contrasting affiliations, each unknowingly wrestle with each other, contesting for control.

Nonetheless, the self should not be mistaken with the representation of the self. What we call the need for recognition is but merely a representation with which the self, whether consciously or unconsciously, fabricates to allow it to serve its societal function.

As for him, he truly believes that there is nothing absolute in life. There is no absolute right or wrong. Rather, there are only things that seem relatively right or wrong. There is no such thing as an absolute. And as he often says to me, "This world does not and will never revolve around your expectations."

I couldn't handle the truth back then. His words have shattered my naive belief that heroes exist. And evils shall perish under the ray of light.

But what of evil itself? Of good? 

Evil is a concept, a notion, that does not exist in the natural world but is intimately tied with legends and religions. The same goes for good. When a lion hunts, kills, and eats an antelope, the lion itself is not evil. It is simply the order of the nature where the strong preys on the weak. There is no moral here. There is only the survival of the fittest.

I think the same thing can be said regarding the human condition. Hobbesians believe that the human nature is corrupted at its core. In simple word, humans are born evil. Without any law to restrain them, humanity will perish. Individuals would live fearing their neighbours. Societies would ceased to function.

Nevertheless, Hobbessian's belief is true insofar as the modern nation-state is concerned. By this, it also means the capitalist mode of production as well as it means and relations. A society built from this kind of system lacks imagination. Or rather, they are too preoccupied with and disillusioned by the many representations offered by determined choices. They are trapped in their own illusions of freedom. 

Such society is driven by desires. And desires would mean scarcity, which in turn means insecurity and instability, which in turn gives birth to inferiority or superiority. This is the foundation of our present society. And it is controlled and regulated by laws. We are too conditioned by the law, and determined by the structures that exist only with the presence of that law until we can't seem to think beyond the very law that we created.

Thus, we read dystopian novels. We watch dystopian movies. Each and every one of them would portray the chaos that arrives with the absence of laws. There will be no order whatsoever. And humanity will be reduced to a mindless creature, an existence without any kind of determination. The portrayal of a dysfunctional society deprived of laws symbolises evil, for chaos is the very representation of evil.

To maintain order, humanity is compelled to place values onto everything that they do so as to allow its society to survive. In this regard, evil cannot be defined in scientific terms. It is merely the fruit born of human illusions.

Yet, this doesn't mean that there is no other way to approach this problem. There is still the option of the valueless and amoral natural world. But it is also a law of a sort. And with our contaminated mind due to the long exposure to capitalism, we may not be able to return to the state of pure survival instinct void of any moral notion.

It is a question I wish to inspect further.

and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into thee

At some point in your life, you will encounter individuals with which their presence would suggest danger, or at least indecency, as if something loose and carnal might happen to you if you just hold their gaze long enough. And at that point, it will rests on you and you alone to decide, whether to fully embrace the creature of the abyss and drown yourself in the sea of lust or to reject them, with every ounce of rational thought you could muster in you, wholeheartedly and let your innocent life strides in its ignorance. For the encounter with the creature is a rare opportunity. Indeed not many of us would have the courage to lock gaze with it. And even less so to allow the creature to touch our vilest desire that we have kept secured from the people closest to us.

fragments #1

There are things I want to tell, worlds I want to portray, people of whom their lives suppressed by judgments--of close friends, families, strangers, societies, judiciaries, governments; these are stories that I want the world to know about. At least that is what my little ambition is, as a writer (or so I thought I am), or as one who is very much awed by the littlest, often seem insignificant, encounters in everyday life.

I've always been aware of anthropology, yet I never had the courage to really delve into it. Even now. My encounters with anthropology were limited to bits and pieces, readings that I took halfheartedly just to fill in the gaps whenever I stumbled upon things that I couldn't make sense of, with my limited theoretical understanding and lack of depth on the world.

The closest I've ever been was when I dabbled, pretty much on the surface, with phenomenology, of Heidegger to be precised. But Heidegger was hard to comprehend (and still does!), and it was merely a hobby, so I left him. Another thing was because of my greed. I was not satisfied with just a theory that explains little things as what they are, theories that only attempt to explain the small scale of events, little units that very much unique thus limiting them to a particular time-space constriction. I thirsted for a grand narrative that could explain everything that is happening anywhere, anytime. In physics, it is often called a theory of everything.

For me, theories as such only hinder further understanding of our world, they distract us from our sole quest for the purest and the most authentic condition; the origin of the world. Thus my construct and how I comprehend the world lacked depth. I couldn't appreciate the smallest gesture; smiles I received, thank yous, or apologies whenever someone brushed me off on the streets. I thought of them as a given, a norm, obligations with functional basis to allow the society to operate, to maintain the social order. There is no agency, for we are all trapped in the clutch of the ideological.

I was very ambitious. Life goes on, moments drifted by, people leave. Ambition is terrifying; it fills you with impatience, and with this, comes rage.

As rage subsided, so did my ambition for a grand, unifying, all-encompassing theory of the world, of reality, of being. Perhaps, this is the closest I've ever been to the truth. I'm satisfied with these little things I'm working with, and I do hope that they would someday grow into things that matter, meaningful enough to touch the hearts of people, however unsympathetic they may be.