It's been awhile since I wrote. It's been awhile since I heard the sound of my own voice. I'm sure it has been speaking. I'm sure it has been commenting on the insensibility and ludicrousness of the world. I'm sure it has been writing epic poetry to match the dirty yellow thunderstorms that meet the daily aching sun of late.

But I have been struggling to hear its words. They are inarticulate, like middle of the night speech bubbles. The only shapes they have are of emotive intonations. Sometimes a stream of question marks, sometimes abrupt strings of full stops, sometimes rising into exclamation marks, sometimes merely commas unending...

I've been listening to Cohen a lot recently. It makes me think of old comic books, like The Preacher and Sandman. Struggles with the mythology and morals of an angry, suffering, beautifully arrogant and mysterious God.

I recently said my only religion is feminism. It doesn't make sense actually. I used to believe in God. I used to believe in mercy and kindness and retribution. Sin and light. I used to pray so much I would fall asleep curved, with my forehead touching my knees. I don't think I muttered my sleep then. My nights were quiet conversations worthy of chapters in a holy book. Flaming swords, exorcism, words that shine with the fire of its own soul. I don't have those kinds of dreams anymore.

It's raining right now. The whole world has a grey, rusty watery skin, and the uneven tarred roads are pocked with millions of angry silver craters. Their footsteps are almost drowning out the sentences that are swarming all around me. I saw a spike of lightning on my way here, white and ultraviolet, slicing the indeterminate sky with its sudden clarity. For a moment, I wondered if it touched anything. A singular tree in an open field invades my mind. I live in a world of cinematic cliches.

And so quickly, the storm is losing its fervour. The thunder is beginning to sound like grumbles rather than apocalyptic statements. The wind has changed direction and my laptop is getting wet. Time to go.

yesterday i bumped into a really good friend, z, while i was about to take money out from an atm. she told me that another one of her close friends (i'll call her a) - we all went on a grrlie holiday together - just gave birth. strangely enough, a was thinking of z just before her contractions began, and that was one day before z's birthday. the next day, 17 july, on z's 30th birthday, a gave birth to her second child.

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i first encountered the concept of synchronicity at a talk. c, who was really into combining psychoanalysis and feminism, asked me to join her. being curious about a field of knowledge i don't usually get into, i went along. the dude was american, and started speaking about his idea of jungian synchronicity. according to him, synchronicities can be recognised through a set of personal symbols that is accessible only to the self. looking at dreams in particular, he went on to talk about how synchronicities pepper throughout our dreamscapes. they appear when there is a need to counter subconscious emotions that are repressed in waking life. for example, feeling really resentful at a partner but not having the desire or energy or some other logical reason deal with it when awake. there is a need to balance out the psyche, and this is where dreams come in. the point is, to be able to recognise repressed emotions, one needs to delve into dreams in search of synchronicities. which can be detected through symbolic reverberations. doop dee doo. i remembered thinking it was all a little suspiciously 'self-healing' and 'oprah' to be taken too seriously.

but it was interesting. and i never really forgot about it. because coincidences are funny things. they make a person think about fate, destiny, the existence of gods and ultimate super computers called 'deep thought'.

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it's fucking hot today. and i had to drive all over the place. with not enough sleep. the last time i didn't have enough sleep and had to drive around KL, i knocked into an old malay woman's right ankle. her sons were lawyers and either have been ignoring her for awhile, or dotes on her incessantly. i had to send her to gleneagles hospital to see if anything was broken. she initially appeared fine, and then got more and more vocal in her expressions of pain as she was on the phone to her sons in the car ride. when they got there, i was threatened with court suits and treated with the sudden display of filial love.

so today i made a note in my head to drive carefully. as i was waiting in a jammed que near the traffic lights, i saw a car bump into the car in front of it. a cloud of dust was freed from the scene of the accident and floated towards the toll booth. even though the damage wasn't great, they caused another jam behind them as hazard lights were bleeped on a minute later. before i had time to muse about this, my que started moving. not a minute later, there was a similar accident on my left lane. a mini 4WD bumped into the car in front of it, and its bumper is on the ground, freshly fallen. a minute later, hazard lights on, and another jam appears.

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so that got me thinking about this whole concept again. i read up a little on wikipedia and another website from a phd student who examined synchronicity in relation to post-structuralism. in a nutshell, synchronicity is about meaningful coincidences that are not causally related. because it is laden with meaning - i suppose from a personal perspective - it is explainable if one accepts that mind, matter, past, present, future, spirit etc is somehow connected in a meta kind of way. kinda reminds me of kaku and his writing about higher dimensions. if there are only 4 dimensions - depth, width, height & time - then a lot of stuff in physics doesn't make sense. theories of quantum mechanics & general relativity contradict each other, and chasing einstein's dream of fusing the two, it becomes clearer if there is a higher dimension, or hyperspace, or parallel universes where things that don't make sense happen and make sense when they do happen (i don't claim to understand any of it, but it's interesting toilet reading!).

so again, looking for the meta equation, the one ring to rule them all. in other words, if you pull back far enough, you see more, and understand more. in kaku's analogy, if you're a carp in a pond, being caught doesn't make sense unless you perceive there is a world outside of the pond.

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my roommate in uni, h, lost her twin brother in a car accident. her mother lives in a different continent to the both of them. at the night of the accident, h's mother dreamt that she was pregnant. her stomach started to hurt so much that she woke up. sensing something wrong, she rang them both. it's a very sad memory.

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what is the point of believing in this concept enough to want to prove it? so that we can better understand the now, or so that we can predict the future, or to know how the now is entangled so meaningfully and purposefully to the future? but this is what we do anyway, every single day. making meaning. drawing patterns in human and social behaviour. creating tactics and making decisions every split second to carry on. if synchronicities are not causally related, then to seek the connection is to unravel the cause or the purpose no? or is it simply reassuring enough to know that things are somehow connected, no matter how obtusely for the moment? 

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i am currently reading the may 13 book, as another theory is expounded on why this event happened. every explanation of history carries within its flesh a cartography of space, time, sequential events and people - a kind of pattern, prediction, with embedded messages of forewarning, prevention, recognition, articulation, something. as texts quiver with each story, the self morphs into another idea. another archetype to feed into another mass of contradicting collective consciousness-es.
m
a lot of what i do is spent on trying to change a certain course of reality. and this means paying careful attention to what's going on right now. what has happened before. what could possibly be a crack into the future. and concurrent futures swimming like small snakes, hissing for dominance. i don't know what thinking about wormholes, parallel universes, jungian synchronicity, post-structuralism and other new language can do.

maybe it's just good toilet musing.

i have been spending an inordinate amount of time watching documentaries about the paranormal, hauntings etc on discovery channel and national geographic. discovery channel does reconstructions of hauntings with witness testimonies about what happened etc. the good thing about that is, at least you know that everyone survived. heh. national geographic goes on the 'scientific' slant. with a mission of debunking the kinds of arguments that ghost/paranormal believers put forward. even when they feature actual paranormal investigators who uses pseudo-scientific techniques, like video cameras, audio-recorders, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors etc, it's with the perspective of making them disprove evidence of hantu2.

obviously, ghosts are interesting stuff. we've believed in it as a form of collective consciousness for centuries. but as knowledge excavations continue to plunder mystery, it requires a lot more courage to believe in ghosts than before. will-o-wisps turn into ball lightnings (literally, little balls of lightning that floats in space for several minutes), orbs turn into bits of dust reflected by light, so on and so forth. might as well believe in things we cannot see like atoms, electrons and plasma than things we can see like hantu and pontianak and like that lah.

i'm a little conflicted by it all. the scariest kinds of hantu are (dis)embodied upon different archetypes of monstrous feminines. pontianak and langsuir are basically women who have their socio-biological roles thwarted. it's almost too simple. if you dont give birth to babies, you'll become a dissatisfied, ugly looking, wailing creature haunting the good people who are trying to make babies in the night. but then they are also powerful; their rupture from the normative giving them an edge of mystery and might that cannot be simply contained and controlled by ordinary people. there is no possession of life force. pontianaks are dead. at the same time, they are immortal. with will and agency.

the contradictions are delicious. how do collective anxieties become stitched onto the creation of these ghosts? how do ghosts materialise from these beliefs? or is the assumption false. that they exist anyway. but people like me are just imposing my analytical beliefs on an accidental harmony of forms?

then we have shamans. witch doctors and plain old witches. bomohs are both men and women. although women bomoh seem a little scarier than men. tarot card readers, gypsies, new agers, psychic readers... even the witnesses in discovery channel who seem to encounter most experiences, most of them are women. what does this mean? that the female form does not only have to embody fear as the objects, but are also subjects that continue to ensure their perpetuation. transmitters of beliefs. a little like the culture argument no? that women are the ones responsible for transferring/educating/socialising new generations of people into normative ideas of gender roles within a particular context. check out cosmopolitan magazine. same shit in a chic bucket.

i'm missing something still.

meanwhile, witch hunts are still on our map. after hundreds of thousands of women (and some men) being killed in the largest state-sanctioned form of capital punishment (esp in european history, 15th - 18th century), we're still doing it.

( Timorese Women Accused Of Being Witches )

i guess thinking about ghosts is still pretty fucking relevant no matter which channel we're on.

sucks.







one of the many lovely instruments of torture in display at an exhibition in Mexico city. most of them designed to be used on women. charming. i heart history.