Congrats on Your Wedding

Love is a miracle.
It happens everyday, everywhere.
I'm thrilled and grateful to know one happens today.
On the far corner of Seattle, by the river,
my sister, Ting Ting Lo marries to Philip Schoesler.
I congrats them here with this "double-happiness".
"白頭到老,永結同心!"

A Letter To Day

Dear Day,

How's it going?
I know letter is so yesterday,
but I write anyway.
Because though I see you everyday
we seldom talk, face to face.
Some say you are a gift to me,
that's why you're also called Present.
That kind of makes me continuously tense.
I'm supposed to treasure you always, every moment, now?
Honestly, I all too often failed.
It seems that you are always available,
in the name of Tomorrow.
In fact, you are but one and only.
Tomorrow you'll be gone.
Forever.
And One Day, ironically, you come no more.
It's kind of sad, but it's true.
So please tell me, remind me or even shout at me:
Love me like I am your very last.

From
Now On

A Letter To Morrow

Hi, how are you?
(Or should I say: how will you be?)
I always feel we are a bit distant.
Of course, we've never actually met.
But you know you mean a lot to me.
In fact, a lot of things I do today is because of you.
Do you know?
Do you care?
I sometimes worry for you.
Will you be sick?
Will you be bad? Or even worse?
But that's really your problem, not mine, isn't it?
So thank you, anyway.
You give me hope.
That's probably enough.
See you tomorrow.

Best wishes,
From Today.

Moon turns to an UFO

Two days ago, as I was on a taxi home, I saw the biggest moon in my life.
It's abnormally huge above the skyline veiled by some thick clouds.
I had one tenth of a second of thought that it's an UFO.
Goosebumps all over me. It's strangely creepy.
I was filled with excitement and awe to come home and told my wife as she had the exact same experience many years ago.

Guess what. Last night,
I dreamed the moon turning into an UFO, over and over again.

The Reminiscence of a Sunbather

I went to swim during my lunch hour.
I didn't feel like pushing myself too far and opted to lie down after few laps.
The sun is not particularly strong.
As I closed my eyes and was soaking up the heat,
I realized I hadn't sunbathed for a long long time.

Blood red, orange, yellowish brown, blood red again.
I loved how we could still "see" the sunlight getting stronger or less through our eyelids
as blankets of cloud, thin and thick, in and out, was sheltering.
My mind went completely off for like eternity before a sense of happiness woke me.
It's in the shape of light.
The light that was dancing in the pool water.
You don't need to go to black hole to see how light was bent.
Swirls of light twisting and turning, onto the side of the pool, and off swimmers' flesh.

Then I thought of my past, good times, happy times.
I thought of what my first experience of beauty was...
Is it a picture of Mount Huang I saw on a calendar,
the singing of Karen Carpenter,
or rather my first experience of ugliness
when I was forced by my mom to "inherit" my sister's pants?
It's a hideous orangey brown.

I thought of my wife's face,
how one late afternoon light caught her face
and the outline was golden.

I thought of sunset
(our shared symbol of sublime beauty).
One time me and a friend were completely captivated by a beautiful sunset on our trip to Cornwall.
We felt it's an imperative to savour that very moment.
We pulled over on the side lane of a hectic motorway,
(it's meant for broken car, maybe lovers' fight, but definitely not taking picture!)
It's a risky romantic thing to do,
as cars and lorries were shooting past us (possibly with swearing).

I thought of this thought itself.
I thought when one was thinking, the world seemed to revolve around us.
I recalled at the age of 18 I think, one day I was on the backseat of a bus after school,
I looked, in the frame of my eyes, was a picture as banal as any other day –
some twenty to thirty people's back wobbling in front of me.
But time froze at that moment. A sense of awe, or the sublime beckoned.
A question was asked. But I wasn't aware of what exactly.
Later I figured it was something like this:
"Why everything exists, rather than nothing?"
"Why I am not that guy or that girl or he or she but a 'me' opposing all these otherness?"
From that day on, a part of me was awaken (or newly born).
Thought wakes up thought wakes up thought...
I realized, all these thoughts were reminiscent of some of the best time in my life.

I opened my eyes and sat up.
I wanted to know what the time was.
A piece of paper writing"out of order" on the public clock.
I knew anyway it was time to go.
Cool!
I thought,
Happiness cost exactly HK$19.
(The pool's entrance fee.)

The sign, the light and the other side (Part 2)

So it's a guessing game. Love, art, poetry, even the art of story-telling in novels and movies. An affair of seducing. A balance act between disclosure and cover-up.

I have this habit of always preying over everything that's happening to me, the street I'm walking on, the man who's sitting next to me in a cafe, the sky that's changing every seconds, hoping that I can perhaps, just perhaps, catch something extraordinary. But of course that's not very often. Most of our days (which consists most part of our life) are just plainly mundane. But from these exercises, something unexpected shows up, at first I cannot quite make sense of what it is. The longer and harder you look at things, the stranger and more beautiful they become. Like a window opens, and you peep into the secret and heart of what you see. It became a "vision", as I've said in other posts.

Maybe Nature is the same. She's hiding something from us. She want us to give time and attention to her. We must give before we take. That is the Natural Law. But our time is fast and limited. We have better things to be occupied. We seldom "see" anymore. We lost the ability to savour things. To "waste" our time on things or people by observing them, talking to them, discover the unfamiliar in things with which we thought we are familiar. So painting maybe just an excuse for me to "waste" my time seeing. (Much like we "waste" our time watching craps on TV as an excuse for doing nothing.) Since the wasting process has this end-product called painting, it can serve as a signpost to the thing itself. Just to say "hey, look at this, it's worth your second look (and thought)."

Having said that, of course a painter is never a passive courier of the "vision" which was bestowed on her/him. Art is personal.

The next day, as the little melodrama between the lovers dies down, anger is replaced with regret. The girl now feels sorry. "Why am I such a petty person? Can I be less egocentric and self-indulging. Why all the trouble when I can just tell my true intention straight away?"

I kind of feel the same. So I've said it, or I haven't?

The sign, the light and the other side (Part 1)

Finally, I finished my first serious painting in thirteen years. Titled "The sign, the light and the other side", 610 x 762 mm, Oil on canvas. As I pondered what I could say about it, my thought was quickly drawn into a dilemma before every little words were gathering and forming a queue.

To ask a painter to write about his/her own work, is to place s/he in a paradoxical situation. When one paints, s/he has picked a particular medium over others to express (or simply just to "put down") something s/he "sees", feels, thinks or whatever has in mind. That is the best way. To do it other way would be self-defeating or self-deflecting (if there's such a word).

In a relationship, a girl (mostly girls, agree?) has certain desire in mind that she wants her admirer to know, say having a romantic night out this weekend, or as trivial as noticing her new lipstick colour ("No, that's nothing trivial! it's bloody important!" You can almost hear her screams). The last thing she wants is to spell it out. Instead if her admirer can see through her mind, by her subtle moves and signs, apparent unrelated suggestions or just telepathy out of his wholehearted devotion to her (Yes they believe it exists!), that will be immensely satisfying. She has found the proof of his love.

But when all her maneuvers go unnoticed with every minute passing, she gets more and more agitated. How can my masterful Van Gogh get no appreciation? Doesn't my beholder see my beauty? Where is his attention on me? In the end, she can no longer contain her desire (and temper), and reveal the mystery (indeed the revelation comes in great enigmatic magnitude as its decibel).

"Oh, Darling, why didn't you just say so!" Her lover complains, doesn't realize he has asked one of the greatest philosophical question about love, and also art.

The Clearest Moment

The romantic salmon

My sister's fiancé Phil, is an American who fishes wild salmon in Alaska. Once we had a conversation around these delectable creatures. He told me the apparent absurdity of their life.

They hatch in the rivers and streams of Alaska. Their body will grow and adapt sea water before embarking on the journey of their life time – swimming across the Pacific Ocean all the way to Australia and heading back ultimately to their birth place. This is the brutal struggle you often see on the Discovery Channel – how they re-adapt back to fresh water, swim and toil up the stream, with miles and miles of rapids and even waterfalls to leap. Not all make it. Most arrive hurt and shattered. In the end, they breed, lay eggs and die. Then the next generation relive the same cycle again under the blessings of their fathers and mothers – their nutrient-rich remains, to be exact.

"What a poor sad little fellow." my sister quipped.

"No, I think it's rather romantic!" I said.

They were baffled. I can understand why. To most people, the word "romantic" means nothing more than the sentiment and feeling associated with love (a candlelit dinner or two lovers walking on a beach being the top romantic cliche). It's the first definition you find in most dictionaries. But look closer, it's actually a tricky word. Here is a list of the definitions given by Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

1: consisting of or resembling a romance

2: having no basis in fact : imaginary

3: impractical in conception or plan : visionary

4 a: marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized
b: often capitalized : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of romanticism
c: of or relating to music of the 19th century characterized by an emphasis on subjective emotional qualities and freedom of form ; also : of or relating to a composer of this music

5 a: having an inclination for romance : responsive to the appeal of what is idealized, heroic, or adventurous
b: marked by expressions of love or affection
c: conducive to or suitable for lovemaking

6: of, relating to, or constituting the part of the hero especially in a light comedy

Language can be a tedious matter. Too much analysis can kill off any...romance. Exactly! So I'm not going to make a linguistic fuss about it. (I'm not competent to, anyway.) All I want to do is to sing out my deep down yearning to be a romantic, roughly in the sense of definition 4th above.

Romanticism originated in the second half of the 18th century largely as a revolt against the rise of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Briefly put, Enlightenment makes rational thinking absolute, while emotion and other sources of gaining knowledge obsolete. Industrial Revolution projected a whole new model for social advancement which many at that time feared the prospect of machine's dominance over human and ultimately our "humanity". I can sympathize with that.

While I don't take in all the Romantic doctrines, especially the glorification of a misunderstood heroic artist, I do cling to the importance of individual autonomy against the zeitgeist of the time, and the emotional aspects of us as human. We are each an unique individual who thinks, loves, cries, has dreams to chase, and is moved by beautiful things (oh no, I don't mean a LV bag!); not just 1 rational task-accomplishing executive in a corporation, 1 single-minded status-anxious wealth-seeking member of a social class, or 1 out of millions of targeted customers in a "market segment". But I'm afraid that's the sort of person (or specimen) our present world is shaping us to be.

Out of the window and onto the shimmering stream, a parrot was seeing for the first time a salmon leaping out of the water. She realized there's an alternative other than a caged life – a monotonous, calculative, cynical life in a materialistic, consumeristic, pragmatic and utilitarian cage. Breaking free became her pressing desire that no rational exercise could deny. Even that also meant the beginning of worries and risk of losing stable supply of food and all that. But what not.

"If you don't risk anything, you risk even more." – Erica Jong

When we think the salmon's life sad, of course we are asserting our values and judgement on them. We think if I was in their shoes – work and toil the whole life but to go back to square one and sacrifice for nothing but a cycle of the same recycle, what's the gain? I cannot answer for the salmon. But that's the thing. We were brought up to be ultra-utilitarian. The question is: Is everything a matter of utility? Even so, a step back, isn't the same cycle happening to us? Only ours is in the shape of a rectangle – waking up in a [bed], going into a glass-adorned [office-block], being stuck in a [cubicle] for hours, working on a [computer], back home exhausted and staring at a box called [TV] before burying ourselves in the [bed] again, day in day out, until our final burial, in a [coffin].

So at the end of the day, death makes us all equal for that matter (the sum of the balance sheet). We are pondering the life of our reflection in a mirror. Do I want to be a romantic salmon believing in a higher calling or a pragmatic parrot selling her soul?

Am I wandering too far? Sorry, that's the problem with romantics.

Sketches on iPhone

I have had my iPhone for few months now. And I've been playing with all these wonderful and useful apps ever since. But not until recently, it dawned on me that there should be one for drawing. It's like remembering there's such a thing called pen upon seeing papers. Couldn't be more obvious.

If we human came so long to click, drag and type on a piece of glass, how more primitive and imperative to just scribble with our index finger, albeit it's not steamed.

A search word "paint" brought me a dozen such kind of apps in the iTune store. I found MyPaint Free so far the best among the free ones. Simple and quick. So now my iPhone is also an "iPad". Sketch on the go. Few samples above.