a very small painting – no. 1

Shirinat, Oil on Canvas, 4.5cm x 4.5cm

if less is more,
small can be big,
like a whisper
"i love u."

Revelation No.1

Revelation No.1, Oil on Canvas, 8"x10"

Want, try, think, say, things.

Martin Creed, Work No. 338 THINGS, 2004

I don't know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying.

- Martin Creed

He said the thing I want to say but don't know how to say it.

Chance or Destiny?

One night into the disappearing Autumn days, I finished work when it's already ten and I had not eaten anything since lunch. I was waiting outside one of those typical Hong Kong style eateries for my takeaway. The road was damp from a shower earlier and painted an amber gloss by the street lamps. My mind and body were in a state between numbness and angst from the tiredness of a day's work and the hungriness which was worsening to a stomach ache. My eyes were following aimlessly on the passersby. The darkness around framed within my slightly blurry vision, a couple was approaching with the breeze like in a movie, cuddling and their gaze fixing on no other. They must have just fallen in love, my instinct told. Their complete absorption in their own emotional world contrasted an analytical question raised in my head from nowhere.

From the possibility of complete randomness to inescapable destiny, what do you believe?

Of billions of people in the world, how many we meet in our life? Suppose we meet a new friend a week and we're granted 80 years on earth, we would be able to know 4320 people. A somewhat regrettably small number in an age when we expect so much. How many friends on your Facebook's friend list? The average is about three to four hundreds, I observed. But how many are those we can truly call friend? How many people whose path we crossed, go on to be someone we truly know and love? How even more scarcely possible is someone who can be the love of our life?

In the first chapter of Essays On Love by Alain de Botton, the main character is calculating the probability of his encounter with his lover Chole on the flight from Paris to London. The answer is one in 989.727. He's being generous when what considered are within the events leading up to that decisive moment. What if they were born in a different country, a different time and even into another sex? We could push the question further back to the meetings of their parents, grandparents, passing cavemen and dinosaurs and on to the beginning of time and fathom the cosmic consequences before life ever appeared on earth. We can rehearse a slight heartache to merely imagine the improbability alone: a bigger big bang, a smaller sun, a different chromosome, a tyranny, a war, a car crash, an unanswered call, a discarded plan, a change of mind, a flight delay, a distraction from otherwise the meeting of eyes and the waltz of two heartbeats.

"...But my fatalistic interpretation of the start of our story was at least the proof of one thing: that I was in love with Chole. The moment when I would feel that our meeting or not meeting was in the end only an accident, only a probability of one in 989.727, would also be the moment when I would have ceased to feel the absolute necessity of a life with her – and thereby have ceased to love her."

When we are in love, we tend to believe that we were made for one and other. I met my wife at work. I remember seeing her name on the company phone list for the first time without having met her, a strange feeling was bestowed upon me for a fraction of a second. I looked back and took it as a sign of predestination after we fell in love few months later. (She had her sign as well.) You could argue it's just a freak sensation, the effect of a chill from the over-cold air-conditioning or the sugar burning from the digestion of the morning's breakfast. I doubt it may be so. But that's not really the point. Love is simply too powerful to make us consign such life-changing event to the hands of mere coincidence. Love makes us into a believer – at last, a higher being has intervened and granted us the miracle of love: the glances exchanged, the mutual longings, the reciprocation of tastes, the fulfillment of your ideals ("she does not only finish my sentence, she complete my life").

I often wonder what atheists and naturalists think when they fall in love. Would they reconsider their world view? (But I suspect not. Actually few of us would have the clear mind and still heart to reason when we're in the hands of Eros. Love has the reputation to be harmful to our sight.) Would they too have a moment of doubting their faith and a "Thank God" slipped out? Would they still hold on to their belief that all things were solely the making of pure chance plus infinite time? They meet their lover like dust gets in their eyes? Even so, isn't it paradoxically miraculous considering the magnitude of causes and consequences that all connect and intertwine like a record-breaking extravaganza of domino display. It takes only a misplacement, a miscalculation, a strong wind, a shake, an overlooked obstacle to ruin the show.

? An impersonal universe without God, implies a closed system where everything is happening in a mechanical way, only monumentally more complicated than the metaphor of a domino set.
? We can imagine a freak twitch triggered the very first cause (well, what caused the twitch to cause the first cause...? It's really the third???...) and what followed an exponential web (and sub-webs) of chain reactions, one after another, until a particular domino piece fall - one so happened to be the love one encountered.
? Doesn't that mean the first predestinated the second, the third and the uncountable inevitable?
? So we come full circle. To believe in chance we are left with no choice but to also believe in destiny?

Where am I? I'm lost in a tangle of hypo-anti-syn-thesis. But what are these really to do with love? A Nobel-prized logician can be the worst lover. Am I predetermined to love differently, had I happened to solve the mystery of fate?

I carried this mass/mess of thought into this unusually cold winter. A time when the passion of the couple I met by chance could have cooled. When the enzyme of love slows, habits gradually replace novelties, differences appear, faults are discovered, the first fight duly arrives, we are not so sure anymore. Our thankfulness turns sore. The conviction of our unmistakable destiny even degrades to the very opposite – total denial. What do we go from here? Is my choice itself also by chance or by destiny? The question seems ridiculous.

Perhaps my very first question is also ridiculous. We human have the tendency to fall from one extreme to the other. Our love is neither the sole making of chance nor destiny, but equally critical if not more, also our own doing. Otherwise, what is love when we are deprived of our freedom to love?

I realized the question sprung were not of any intellectual interest, but the raw feeling of amazement. It triggered a stream of thoughts not to answer, but simply to remind – the lost feeling of falling in love.

To ask such questions, to take this mental voyage to the limit of what we can comprehend, is like shooting us high into the stratosphere where we can glimpse the vast space beyond, the possibility and yet the incapability of going further. For a momentary ecstasy and the confrontation of the sublime, we're pulled, albeit reluctantly, back to earth. But at least, we've been there. We have witnessed the wonder but also its fragility. We have contemplated all the what-ifs, not necessarily to regret but to appreciate the scheme of things:

At the end of the novel Love In A Fallen City (傾城之戀), the author Eileen Chang (張愛玲) marveled that it might take the fall of a city to fulfill the love of her heroine. She might underestimate. It could have taken the working of the entire universe, and perhaps more.



I wrote the song two hours before we met.
I didn't know your name or what you looked like yet.
Oh I could have stayed at home and gone to bed.
I could have gone to see a film instead.
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends.
Life could have been very different but then,
something changed.
Do you believe that there's someone up above?
Does he have a timetable directing acts of love?
Why did I write this song on that one day?
Why did you touch my hand and softly say.
Stop asking questions that don't matter anyway.
Just give us a kiss to celebrate here today.
Something changed.
When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing,
that in a matter of hours we'd change the way we were going.
Where would I be now if we'd never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?
I dunno but like you said
something changed.

[I remembered this forgotten song as I wrote. A song of my youth. It was out when things were about to changed.]

The Morning Benders - Excuses (Yours Truly session)

A song I love lately.

Some C. S. Lewis Quotes

"Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours."

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."


On friendship

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."


On literature

"I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."

"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."


On Christianity

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

We read to know we are not alone.

[From 5:00 onwards]

C. S. Lewis:
We read to know we are not alone. Do you think that's so?

Student Chadwick:
Well, I hadn't thought at it before like that, Sir.

C. S. Lewis:
No, nor would I. I suppose people would say, "We love to know we are not alone. Would you?

Student Chadwick:
Well, if you mean falling in love, well, I haven't really, I mean, I probably learn more about love from books than from personal experience.

C. S. Lewis:
[A pause of silence and turns to the window] Go on, I'm listening.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more; only the life I have lived. Twice in that life, I've been given the choice, as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety; the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.


I think along the path of life, there are few things that one must feel thankful of. A "life author" is one of them. By that I mean not just a good writer with few books you enjoy, but a great mind that you can connect with, for life. S/he's your mentor, your friend and could be almost like a soul-mate. I'm fortunate enough to find in the writings of C.S. Lewis. There aren't many authors who possess as diverse a body of work as him: from literature criticism, theological writings, Christian apologies, poetry, autobiography, collective letters and essays, novels, science fictions (Space Trilogy) to the classic children books, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I don't consider myself an avid reader. I read very little. I cannot compare him with other great thinkers and writers through out the history of mankind. But often greatness is not to be known by comparison. It stood there. You just know when you see it.

I re-watched recently the movie Shadowlands. It's based on the true story of him and his wife Joy Davidman and how they come to terms with Joy's cancer illness and her subsequent death. The above conversation gives the movie an understated but conclusive end. For an Oxford professor who suffered the pain of losing his mother at an early age and opted for a life safe from the turbulence and possible agony of being in love, it's an unexpected life event to meet an American writer at his middle age and go on to marry her.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

What C. S. Lewis wrote in books and believed in mind, now became a reality that he struggled to live through. "Experience is a brutal teacher, you learned, my God you learned." A cry in the movie after Joy's death. He did experience a period of questioning his faith and theodicy, later recorded in his book A Grief Observed, which helped inspire this movie.

It's worth a watch just for the brilliant performance of Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger (Academy Award nomination for Best Actress). It's a quiet, sometimes slow-paced film. Nothing overdramatic but possibly tear-jerking and even life-changing.

On Growing Up

I saw it one day on a bus ride.
Under a flyover,
two miniature-like kids running over the forbidding bank
between two opposing roads.
That's it.
It's the picture.
The picture that froze in my mind.
Skipping thousands of reasons,
jumping hundreds of conclusions,
emitting and connecting trillions of nerve impulses or maybe
just one struck by lightning –
The picture of how we're growing up.

Tracey Thorn – Love and its Opposite

To me, the singing of (my) Everything But The Girl – Tracey Thorn remains to be the voice of 90s'. Her voice seems to emerge from the deepest recesses of her throat and have been just steadied from sobbing minutes ago. Bear with me, I'm an incurable sucker of melancholic vocals and tunes.

From the heart-breaking "I don't want to talk about it" to the refreshing electronic makeover of "Driving" and "Missing", I can almost time-travel into the past. But before an actual time machine was made, we can only grow old forward. And she apparently did. After years of self-imposed hiatus to concetrate on parenting three children she had with her EBTG partner Ben Watt, she released another solo album this May, titled Love and its Opposite. She described it as "a record about the person I am now and the people around me ... about real life after forty." So Thorn wonders in the album's opening track "Oh, the Divorces!":

Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along
And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands

Anyone who is married or have been married could find sympathy with the lyrics. Love (and marriage), can be as strong as death, and can be as brittle as a changing thought.

As the irony is floating in the air, I notice the song is a waltz.

Pringle of Scotland Animation by David Shrigley

Speaking about Scottish, here's a truly hilarious stuff made in Scotland.