When you call

when you holler
the wind, the rain, the thunder
will come through

when you whisper
the dew, the breeze, the drizzle
will make do

and when you call
the sun, the stars, the moon
will serve you

Bauhinia

Bauhinia

Popping violet in green bush sturdily rises 

in front the sky-high concretes.

Bouncing branches among monsoons carry 

heart beats of urban hustle-bustle.

Imperial far east as it’s first found

remains a not-twice anomaly — cross-bred,

East and west, airheaded mistake or 

calculated diplomatic?

Painfully blossoming in gloomy traffic;

like a fake corsage pinned in

personage-filled banquet room.

A fruitless efflorescence!

Alas! The bauhinia is a curse of

perennial flourish! Fate has it however spendid, 

remarkable, reproduce not itself except

on tattoo-ed finite silver money.

Headache imagery

Gall-bladder temple

Frog-hopping pulse

Heartbeat in head

Thoughts clotted bad

Star-tattooed retina

Monochrome metro map

Tree-lined blood vessels

When lids drop dead

Thought-cramped arteries 

Tunnel-jam veins

Poppy-red watercolour 

Blotted on cheeks

Semi-vibrating eardrums 

Two times thick

Cut-blade breeze 

Heats up mists.

On the bike

Two feet take turns
to stride towards the end with fury.
Each push each side
forces me along the velocity.

The quicker I go
The nearer you are under my feet.
The harder I push
the more impossible to propel you.

Queer attachment
I cannot remove you!
Dark passageway
As if the moon was you!

The moon follows where I go;
your eyes accompany my flow.
Wonder if I've reached the edge of sorrow
yet sorrow seems not finite shadow!

Dissecting a Heart

Terrible blade
penetrates into soft muscles;
soft muscles cannot
resist the acuteness
and bursts forth like a flaming blossom
with one million heavens in -

The pulmonary vein
a long lake on which floating boats
rolling; carrying piles of correspondence
of slow influxing breaths
of your pristine, pure perspiration
as scent of the oasis springs up the dryland

The aorta
a turbulent sea cannot longer await to
toss and turn fierce and fertile fishes
preparing to mate, to
send all over Atlantic
the affection the broad blue water holds

The vena cava
a lazy-going reservoir of sentiment
exhausted creatures thirsty for love
find a quiet resting place just in
search for what they deserve,
what the story entails

The pulmonary artery
a finale of rowing river of impatience
holding nearly-bursting bottles, and towards
the lungs, tails of love-alphabets are
written in breaths and voices
jostling in particle-filled air towards you

Blake's "To see a world in a grain of sand"

"To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour."

Lately I have been reading the legendary Chinese painter Feng Zikai's essays. I was touched and moved deeply by a piece entitled "Gradually", and the fact that Feng quoted Blake's lines even lifted the meaning and message beyond the mundane level, in a sense that matters on Earth are capable to get rid of the confinement of chronology or parameters of any kind, notwithstanding the fact that these matters are constantly imposed meanings and standards of human knowledge.

A grain of sand might be a minute detail to the human eyes, and in the relative sense a world is far too vast, far too difficult to conduct any thorough expedition upon. Eternity and an hour, infinity and the palm; these are juxtapositions, stark contrasts, two ends of a spectrum, just as the acidic and the alkaline, black and white, that no one would equate one another. Yet Blake did it, through a philosophical way. To say an object is minuscule and minute is as if negating its capacity to carry a vast number of details in the ordinary. However human standards are not the absolute standard that dictate the world. Forms of beings can vary, and standards are relative. Imagine bearing the eye of an ant, a grain of sand may truly be huge boulder that carries the most fatal power to bring its life to a halt; imagine bearing the eye of a bee or butterfly, wild flower must be a heaven full of vividness, fertility, as a cornucopia of abundance, harvest, fruitfulness. Human eyes are such a constraint to our own imagination; seeing shall never be equated to believing. One can never imagine the significance behind minute details in the world because he can never stretch his sight beyond the magnification of his own reception. Thus the state of being of the world is never absolute, rather it is arbitrary, inconsistent, subject and relative.

If one has the honourable bravery to try his own eyes and imagination, to break through the human pre-existing and congenital imposition of barrier bestowed by nature, he would have the capability to see through the lens of Blake. I was very astounded by the utter resemblance of the appearance of a brain cell and the universe. As an absolute result one must have a slight imagination of the possibility of himself actually residing in the brain cell of another extremely enormous being. This thought is not without its temptation; it leads us to a spiral of queer thoughts: are we not the puppets of the enormous being's imaginative faculty? Are we not what it envisages in secret? Are we not then, the very minute details of this enormous being's fanciful world, that formed his great mind of inexhaustible possibilities and can-do's? The ever smallest and insignificant being on Earth forever bears the quality of endless possession of microscopic details, and the microscopic details are forever capable of nanoscopic details. It is as though William Blake is the M. C. Escher of the poetic field; he envisages the impossible as the possible, converses the dead end into a continuing flow of river, exhausting any meaning in the world in order to find it inexhaustible. 

The relativity of time is even a more tempting and romantic idea. The randomness and arbitrariness of happenings would seem to empower an hour, a mere hour, and transform it into an important moment in history. Irreversible is the nature of time. Once a happening occurs in a however small frame of time, it is eternity. It is not only the hour can be eternity, it is as well the minute or the second. In an hour it indeed lives a million of possibilities. In the most romantic love story a young and attractive girl offers a kiss to the boy, and that moment, sets an equation to infinity and eternity. An outsider can never fathom what complex emotions are lingering in between that second of eternal happening, but can only tell that it is a truth that is unable to be turned back and negated. In the most tragic story a bomb explodes in the most crowded plaza in town, murdering thousands of beloved ones of hundreds of warm homes. That moment of fatal entailment would move the victims eternally, and although the casualties happen in a mere second, the impact is however vast and far-reaching; hundreds of thousands of variety of feelings and sentiments are passing to and fro between individuals. People's lives are forever ruined. Families collapse. Now this is the substantiality of having eternity in a second or an hour. 

A moment to remember, a moment to destroy, a moment that is almanacked on to the book of history, multiplied by billions of these books possessed by everyone in the world - that is the nature of eternity, and potentially, it is possible to make a grasp onto, because however tiny a detail is, it is capable of being destructive, powerful, dynamic, dramatic... as a cornucopia, the symbol of abundance.

Guilt

I feel really guilty for abandoning writing since 2014. Sorry, my pen is my life. I now realise.

Lolita

He resembles my dad, 

In a way that he says

Goodnight in a German accent 

Beside my bed.

He resembles my schoolmaster, 

In a way that he'd holler

With sheer solemnity

When I create a blunder.

He resembles my childhood idol,

In a way that he is 50 years old

Now, with glamorous charisma 

And sharp wit as lightning bolt.

He resembles my mentor,

In a way that he'd offer

Inspiration unconditionally

To make me an excellent writer.

That's why I resemble LOLITA,

Loved by a man whom is older

Than me by two decades or greater.

Suspiria - More of a piece of visual art than a masterpiece in film

Suspiria, directed by Dario Argento, is a visual feast, but in terms of plot, I am very convinced that I can write some stories better than this. It has an extremely simple, straight-forward single plot - a girl falling into the limbo full of witches, nearly got enmeshed. Being very rich in visual and auditory effect, the film is aesthetic to the max when it comes to judging it by how Argento tried to convey the sense of horror and uncanniness. Yes, viewers will not survive even the first five minutes, as the tagline suggests that horror is present throughout the film, as it goes "The only thing more terrifying than the last five minutes of this film are the first 90", but the scare factor, is really the extreme contrast of the primary colours presented on the silver screen, or, the notorious Suspiria theme song by Goblin (thrills and shrills guaranteed), rather than the plot.

The Brilliant Use of Colour
I am not a visual art person, so do not judge me if I do not get the professional terms correct, given that the film is really an outstanding work in visual art. First, it is of course due to the above-mentioned use of primary colours. Scenes are almost always expressed in a monochrome way - not black and white, but RED, BLUE, YELLOW. Vivid, very vivid colours, particularly the red, which is the dominating colour in the whole theme. This facilitates viewers' association with blood, and this is one of the scare factor. Below are some examples:

Eerie much, uncanny much, that it leaves viewers shivering. It is some kind of beverage (red wine? I can't recall) shown in the above screenshot, but it is amazing that Argento attempted to make it looks like bloodshed. That is in fact one of the scenes that viewers can spot out the deliberate adding of peculiarity by Argento, after all, is it not queer that wine does not actually look like blood?

It is important to note that different colours convey different mood and atmosphere. Red is a warning, a foreshadowing of bloodshed, as the colour always accompanies sirens in everyday life. It gives a kind of horror that is almost disgusting, that you expect immediate danger, like how the exterior of the Ballet School is, on the whole, in red, and the red occupies full screen whenever the wall is shot. In the first ten minutes of the film, almost all scenes are in red, including the brutal murder scene that is notorious for being extremely graphical. Blue is usually seen in scenes at night, or midnight. Tension is created when the blue is employed, as in the scenes that the characters are in covert - in the attic, et cetera. Yellow cannot always be spotted out, but it is again the eerie sense that it conveys that matters. After all, when primary colours are used solely in one scene, the vividness can possibly tell many stories and feelings and atmosphere, as in real life, rarely can we visualise such bold colours.

Colours are not the SOLE scare factor. Precisely speaking, colours are not the only element that makes the film a piece of visual art. Floral patterns, geometric patterns, et cetera, are ABUNDANT in an array of scenes.

I personally see no scare factors in the employment of these patterns, but it adds to the exuberance of the visual effects. To be frank, none of the horror films I have seen contains rich visual elements as Suspiria does, and this is one reason why I appreciate this film so highly. Seeing this film is as if visiting an art gallery exhibiting paintings, yet the paintings exhibited are constrained in the theme "Graphical Horror". Aesthetically, the film is excellent. It is purely beautiful.

Theme song is a recurring nightmare!
It is guaranteed that the theme song lingers on for days in your brain. Brainwash, almost indoctrination, the nightmare of the eerie (sorry for the running out of vocabulary) musical piece replays and replays and replays... No way can you be rid of it! The theme song, scary as it is, is certainly a strong scare factor. I am only a dilettante in music, so I am not going to comment on the music, let alone judging how the music is composed in order to give it the frightening effect. This piece is constantly played in the film, so when the song is played, the viewers would sense the uncanniness, and thus Argento is again successful in scaring viewers off. At a point, the music accelerates, and tension and suspense is built up, especially in the final scene in which the protagonist tries to sneak into the school masters' room. The music, together with the colours, forebode the danger that the protagonist is going to encounter. The acceleration of the music quickens up the pace of the plot progression.
Warning: The song is really like a constant sweep of wind... Only that it is from nowhere!

Plot is simple, too simple for 90-minute film
I expected more in a film, to be frank, not only fragments of horror knitted together in a simple plot like how Argento did. Few deliberate disgusting and uncanny scenes are left unexplained, for instance the maggots. I cannot see the purpose in plot of employing this, yet, it is essential, at least in my opinion, for the things happened and presented in the film to be well explained and have great significance. Right now, the maggots seem redundant. Yet, the film is good I must say, but can be better. For a horror film to excel, it must be rich visual-wise, symbol-wise, and plot-wise. The theme is scary and frightening, but just graphically, which it leaves no thrills in me after I watching it. I classify horror in two types - first is the visual ones as presented in Suspiria, next is the psychological ones as presented in films like Ju-On, Repulsion, et cetera. Personally I feel like the second type of horror stays in my mind longer and it haunts me for a longer period, rather than the graphical ones. That is the flaw of Suspiria. It only gives me thrill when I view the screenshots now.

In terms of the storyline, it can be considered a very simple tale - an innocent girl meeting witchcraft. It is driven by supernatural elements only, which to me is the type that is rather unconvincing, as for films like The Shining, human sanity also plays a part, so it is closer to reality. I am not criticising supernatural films as they are, some of them are superb and brilliant, but only Suspiria is rather superficial in examining the power of supernatural force to human beings; it is conveyed as only frightening, nothing else.

All in all, Suspiria is slightly overrated. It is excellent as it is beautiful like a picture in an exhibition, but it is not a perfect story to tell. There is a difference. If only the two could become complementary in the film.

Foreword

Every book has a section of foreword written by the author (perhaps not, or perhaps by an editor or someone else). This is although not precisely a book, still I would like to write down the reason why I am writing and why this site is set up, as how an author would introduce his/her story to the readers before the readers gain their first impressions on the work.

This is not a blog, either. This is certainly not a scrapbook. I treat this as where I publish what I write and where I share my words to everyone in the world who has access to the Internet.

I have always wanted to write. I have been privately writing poems, some short stories and some reviews on horror films which belong to my favourite genre of films. Yet, they have never been brought to see the world out there, and their visages, have also been well hidden behind the veil. I would want to take this opportunity to share them with all the literature lovers out there.

Readers may ask why I did not start the site earlier, if I have always been so eager to share my work. The answer would always be the one, that I am afraid. By no means I am showing off my competence in the English language, that would be silly, and certainly I have got a lot to learn. But there are always some people who like to gossip about other people. True that I was too moved by these people, I was afraid of being the talk of the TOWN. Now, no, I am not afraid, for I have true passion in literature and I strongly believe that words never fail me.

This is the end of FOREWORD. Turn the page, dear readers, to start the journey through the sea of my words.

Joyce N.
9/6/2014