You see, I'm taking this rather horrid Science GEM called Life as a Complex System, and everytime I go for the lectures, I am once more reminded of how East is East and West is West and the twain shall never meet (never mind the 'deconstructing' second part of Kipling's poem).
When I told Joan I was taking this module, she said wasn't complexity something that we have always been talking about in Lit class? Yes, but over at the other end of the world they have a very different conception of "complexity".
So this is what usually happens during the lectures. The lecturer would introduce a concept and I would immediately think of its counterpart (but not equivalent) in 'Lit' terms.
Science lecturer: Living beings are complex systems. Complexity involves complex numbers. Chaos means non-linear systems. But they still can be expressed in the form of a simple equation.
Me: "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged...". It eludes your totalizing grasp. Chaos is the flux which threatens to overwhelm the tiny island of civilization. "Significant form" is a line down the middle of a painting.
Science lecturer: I like mathematics. I like to know things with precision.
Me: I love to read texts and discourses for their "ambivalence", their slippage, their excess of signification. Slide down the endless metonymic chain of desire. In the Beginning, There Were Not Maxwell's Equations of Light.
Science lecturer: Scientists are still trying to discover the origin(s) of life.
Me: Why this metahistorical quest for metaphysical being? Let us write genealogies, not evolutionary narratives of beginning, middle and end. Let us talk about "births", not "origins".
There are of course, several scientific theories which have been appropriated and reinterpreted by writers and theorists of the humanities. The parallel between quantum physics and poststructuralism is clear. I suspect Foucault's concept of "emergence" and Derrida's concept of "iterability" owe much to biological and mathematical discourses respectively. And as Barthes has argued, both science and literature are discourses, neither having any privileged access to 'truth'. But science is still slow to recognize its discursive nature, and I don't think it has really pushed the implications of its own theories.
So, at the present at least, there is still an irreconciliable divide between the arts and the sciences. And this is probably why, as Joan has so wisely pointed out, Arts people don't go out with Science people.
kaoru said at 10:47 PM
After Postcolonial Lit lecture, Joan and her friend and I went for lunch. And when we were talking about essay writing styles and I mentioned GP, Joan's friend said, "Point. Elaboration. Evidence." And I knew straightaway that he was from AJ.
When I returned home, I began to think that this guy seemed rather familiar, and then I realised that was because he resembled KR in his mannerisms and manner of speech. I went to ask KR over msn whether he had a senior in AJ called Leon, and true enough, he did. And when I went to check the yearbook, I discovered that Leon was from 29/01, the senior class which very kindly 'adopted' my class in our first year because we were number 36 and had no corresponding JC2 senior class.
So my senior has turned out to be my junior now. =X
And he resembles KR. =X
This is getting very, VERY, VERY strange indeed.
kaoru said at 6:33 AM
First, let me, by way of carthasis or exorcism, tell you about the 4 very disturbing images that have cropped up during various conversations with friends over the past week and which have tainted the purity of my mind.
(Names have been modified to protect the identity of persons involved.)
1. Dr G writing "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday" and so forth on his underwear.
2. Dr G ironing his clothes.
3. Dr G ironing his clothes in a frilly apron.
4. Wxxxy flapping around the swimming pool in rubber float and flippers.
The horror, the horror! Save me from my insane imaginings!
~~
After planning and writing for 3 whole days and having only 3 hours of sleep last night, I managed to deliver my presentation on Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies this morning without any hiccups. I'm so relieved it went well, 'cos although I was too tired to feel very nervous, I was still worried that it would not go down well with Dr S A. But everything went ok and I'm glad at least one assignment is out of my way. But now I have to catch up with everything else that has piled up... =___=;
I actually had a lot of trouble preparing that presentation because I had caught a small cold and for days my mind was feeling all woolly and my thoughts were all indistinct. Definitely not the best of conditions for thinking about metafiction and structures and floating signifiers. And when I was writing the actual presentation on Sunday night, it was so difficult to squeeze the words out that at times I really felt like chucking the whole thing into the wastepaper bin (figuratively of course, because I was working on the computer). But strangely, the words started flowing out of me so much more smoothly as the hours went by and my brain got more and more fuzzy. At 2am, I was even struck with a sudden bout of poesy and penned the last paragraph of my presentation, which even now, in the more sober light of day, is far more elegant than anything I have written in quite a while. So does this confirm my mother's hypothesis that I write better when my mind is drugged with medication or lack of sleep?
I've always known that my mind works in strange ways but this is weirder than ever. Perhaps this is a (very unhealthy) way of liberating one's mind from rigid constraints and letting it express itself freely?
kaoru said at 4:09 AM
After a whole month of staying at home and talking mostly to my sister only, it was quite a relief to be able to see so many familiar faces and to talk to people other than my sister again (not that I don't like talking to my sister - there are some things that can only be said to her - but I believe one needs to have relationships with a variety of people in order to be 'enriched' as a person). I had lunch with PY, Minwei, Marianne and May (so many Ms...), and after they left for the Utopias and Dystopias seminar, I met Wanching outside the library. When I was inside the library, I met Edwina and we talked for one whole hour!! And when I was at the bus-stop waiting for the 96 in the evening, an old secondary school friend came up to me to say 'hi', and as I was getting onto the bus, I met Brandon walking towards the bus-stop.
I've not talked so much in one day for a long time. I guess meeting my friends again made me realize how much I like being around them and talking to them, despite my love of silence and solitude. I'm beginning to really appreciate the irresolvable tension the Woolf novels consistently posit between society and solitude- perhaps all of us as individuals are always trying to achieve a balance between the need for personal, private space with the need to reach out and communicate with others.
kaoru said at 4:10 AM
And then there were the numerous JC 'class' gatherings that attracted only the same faithful few, while the rest hemmed and hawed and gave lame excuses.
And then there are times when your friends genuinely want to attend, but luck simply isn't on your side.
I was reading E. H. Carr on the accidental event in history this morning, and after finishing about half of the chapter, I rushed downstairs to have a small lunch, because I was supposed to meet Minwei and Diana for our long-awaited gathering at Chocolate Factory in the afternoon. As I was gulping down my 2 slices of corn biscuits and a small mango, my handphone buzzed with an incoming message, and Carr flashed into my mind - what if a chance event were to disrupt the orderly, rational progress of my planned gathering and throw everything up into the air? But I brushed aside the unauspicious thought and went to wash my plates and utensils. Before I could finish washing up and check the sms I had received, Minwei called to tell me Diana had diarrhoea that morning and asked if I wanted to cancel the outing. So after having our theatre show cancelled because the actor accidentally broke his toe and postponing our gathering till the end of the holidays, and then changing the day from Fri to Thur and back to Fri and thus having no choice but to leave out PY because she wanted to go back to JB on Fri, a totally random bout of diarrhoea can appear out of the blue and derail all my plans?!
Well, it only goes to show you that the most perfect, meticulous plans human beings craft can crumble to ashes in the indifferent face of the explosion of the contingent.
So in the end, I cancelled the gathering. Because I had less than half a proper meal with no food in the house, and because my sister was moaning non-stop about the loss of the promised cake from Chocolate Factory, my dad went to buy some cake from the stall in the market. And so we had to make do with this:
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And this:
Not exactly posh nosh but it was enough to make me feel a little bit better about the failure of yet another gathering...
kaoru said at 5:49 AM
I've bought most of the books I need for this semester, and while most of them are very thick and filled with tiny font and promise to wake me up at 3am to finish them in time for class, I'm pretty excited to be reading lots of new works by writers I have not read before. I guess I'm a bit tired of looking at Mrs Dalloway, The Years and Orlando for the third or fourth time already.
The Lit modules I'm taking this sem (apart from the HT of course) are Metafictions and Postcolonial Literature. The former is taught by the renowned Dr S A, and this will be the first time in 4 years that I'm taking her modules. Most people are amazed to hear that I've never been taught by Dr A before, but I always seem to miss out her modules every time they were offered for some reason. She's reputed to be very intimidating, but lots of people seem to think I'll like her (one senior even thought I was a Dr A fan??) so I hope it does turn out to be the case.
Apart from the Lit modules, I have to do a Breadth module as part of my graduation requirements. Since Business modules take up a lot of time and effort, it's an open secret amongst final year Arts students that it's better to take a Science GEM as a Breadth module. But I dislike Science subjects and I hate doing lab experiments (that's why I'm an Arts student, right?), so doing a Science module is a real bore. This time I'm just picking the only Science GEM that fits my ideal 3-day week timetable and I'm going to use my final S/U option on it, so I'm not really very concerned about the content matter of the module, which is very unenticingly called "Life as a Complex System". Neither PY nor Minwei are taking this module, so I guess I'll just be floating in and out of class for the whole semester without speaking to anyone. Sometimes it is a relief to be completely anonymous in the LT and to be able to do what you please alone.
Ok, I guess that's all I have to say for now. I had better get back to reading Orlando again...
kaoru said at 5:49 PM
It's really amazing to think how these coincidental meetings can happen when there are so many people moving about all over Singapore at any point in time in a day. Singapore isn't a very large place, but it still is a city with 4 million people flowing in and out of its MRT trains and shopping malls. And you can just look up from a shelf of manga in the middle of a large bookstore to find your friend standing right opposite you.
A totally unexpected meeting that made an otherwise nondescript day a little more significant for me.
kaoru said at 6:30 PM
But the National Museum is now bright, airy and quite a successful hybrid of tradition and (post)modernity. Nothing spooky about it anymore. I particularly liked the mechanical oscillating red chandeliers hung high up on the glass ceiling of the new extension. They seem to 'update' the traditional colonial heritage of the museum (and of Singapore) with a modern fascination with the speed and movement of machines, without going the way of the Italian Futurists.
The exhibition was pretty informative, but my primary interest was in the artefacts as works of art (in one sense to the ancient Greeks and in another sense to 'moderns' like us) and as 'real' objects the ancient Greeks have sculpted and painted and eaten and drunk with and been buried with. It's actually quite difficult to imagine that the amphora standing serenely in a glass case in front of you was actually used as a practical utensil by individuals 2000 years ago. I would have liked to have been able to touch the artefacts and literally feel their historicity, but that would have gotten me hauled out of the musuem by the guards.
The most breath-taking exhibit was definitely the 2m-tall Venus statue (I forget the exact name). When I first laid my eyes on it, I was like, wow. It was flawless, not a chip on the body, not an imperfection on the surface. Everything was so carefully carved, down to the flowing folds of Venus' robes. And then you realize that this isn't the original statue by a Greek sculptor - it's actually a Roman copy. But by adding the magical words "in Antiquity", the imitation becomes just as valuable as if it was the original. It's fascinating how a simulacrum can attain its own "aura" after a suitably long period of time has passed.
After we finished walking around the exhibition, Kevin and I headed down to The Picturehouse to catch the latest anime film showing in Singapore, Vexille. The CG animation and action scenes get two thumbs up, and the premise of the story is intriguing (already I sense a potential paper on anime and Japan's reflection on its past brewing at the back of my mind), but the film's concerns with technology felt a bit rehashed and simplistic after the phenomenon of Ghost in the Shell. Characterization was also pretty shallow. The mad scientist/dictator character was a bit of a cliche. But it's still a pretty good film and very good animation. Singapore's attempts at animation (just watch the trailers of Zodiac and Legend of the Sea) look like a baby's scratchings in comparison =____=;
kaoru said at 6:19 PM