Day 28/ The Isolation Journals: What Worth

Write about a time when your bravery or curiosity was stronger than your fear. If it moves you, dance it out.

When I was finally settling my feet on the grounds of my dreams I wrote this poem. For I recognised myself that I had chosen a difficult route, and I remember asking myself then (as I still do now), if I could ever turn the other way and save myself the trouble. And then and all the times nowadays my answer remains the same.


Untitled. 22 June 2018. Written on the back of a makisan order sheet, on a bus ride home.

But would you let yourself do that?
You will fear,
you will fracture under your own weight,
your protruding veins as reminders.
But you wouldn't.
You wouldn't give up-- you couldn't.
Because you know deep down that there is hope.
That there is a slice of possibility that you could be made for something beyond yourself.
That your heart will never be satisfied with half-heartedness
No, you will dance till your soles are worn through
You will work till you are soaked in sweat 
And your eyes will never stop yearning to see more
Your mind never stopping in its hope of creating
I told you, and you know it,
The part which hurts most is what keeps you alive.

Day 27/ The Isolation Journals: Thin Places

Day 27 - Jordan Kisner
The title of my book, Thin Places, comes from a notion in Celtic mythology that the distance between our world and the next is never more than three feet (i.e. just a little more than an arm's reach away). There are "thin places" where that distance shrinks and then vanishes, where you can glimpse some other world or way of being for a brief moment. Often, "thin places" are literal places, geographical locations that feel holy or otherworldly, but you could also imagine these kinds of thresholds popping up anywhere: in a hospital room, in a bar, in your apartment, in your relationship, in you. A thin place may also be a moment, a time when you were briefly suspended between a world/life that you knew and something totally new, different, awesome, frightening.

Your prompt for today:

Describe a “thin place” or threshold you’ve encountered. It could be a location, an experience, a relationship, a period of time. Describe it in as much concrete detail as you can: what did you see, smell, feel with your hands? How did it make you feel? Who else was there? What led you there? What did you do? What happened afterward? Did anything change? It may feel hard to describe—that's ok! Ineffable experiences are the hardest to describe. Get weird!

The only 'thin place' that I can really think of at this moment I've already previously written about (Day 13), when I'd suffered a brain infection and woken up in hospital, stayed there for a week, and for that week and about one more after that I was in a realm where the suffering in the world could not for a second hold down my hopes and dreams. But since I've already described that, that which I don't suppose I can ever find a contemporary, I thought I'd share some of the things I've learnt about something related to this concept of 'thin places', one which is rooted in Japanese culture and beliefs.

The Japanese believe in this thing called 'ma', most concisely but also most inadequately described as an 'empty space-time'. In space, it is a hollow three-dimensional area, measured by length, width and the typical and practical notions of how to quantify space. But in space, 'ma' is also a viewer's imposition of his perspective and his experience on that area. It contains a supposition of things that could fill it, and thus fills the hollow with potential. In this way as well, space and time are not mutually independent. A space is defined by a time and vice-versa. And with the supposition of a viewer to situate an object or happening in an empty space is also to collapse his past, present and future into the 'hollow' space-time unit. 'Ma' thus transcends the three-dimensional world that we know of, and enters a spiritual world, a world of no time or all time, a world of no worlds for it spreads across and intermingles boundaries. In the Shinto religion, the 'kami' or spirits that they worship are just an ineffable; uncontainable, unpredictable, and unrecognisable. They are believed to appear and disappear, and throughout many Japanese customs is the arrangement of the 3D world to suit these elements of the no-world. To create spaces suitable for the temporary presence of the kami, for forces of the transcendent and enlightenment. Homes, gardens, seemingly random places of worship delineated with the belief that they are sacred places of 'ma' where kami appear. The language itself embodies this belief, albeit more obscurely. Not linear, but upward and outward, strokes that are themselves matter as well as delineations of emptiness between them, and in my view, also creating pathways of sorts, a maze of many beginnings, turns, and ends. 

How fascinating, isn't it? 

Day 26/ The Isolation Journals: Apart, Together

What’s a memory of a collective ritual, inherited or invented, that was meaningful or formative to some part of your identity? Write about it. Who was there? What was the activity? What were the words that were used? What time of year was it? How did it make you feel? And years later, how might it have shaped you?

Dinners at home. With its unspoken conventions that my family and I tread lightly on, for we have never really thought ourselves to hold traditions particularly close but nonetheless, dinner, has come to be its own little mark in the day. The best kind is when Yeema's food is available that night, and we un-stack the tiers of the tiffin carrier to savoury and saucy wonders, pour the soup out into a bowl and settle in front of the TV. More often than not my sister and I hand the remote to our mother because she has adopted a (annoying) habit of disapproving things that we watch. That said, she does have a good taste in movies. 

It is a nice congregation when we are usually all dispersed and doing our own thing. I think inherently my mother and I prefer to work on our own, coming together only for deep conversations or when my mum needs help with how to use Zoom or Powerpoint. My sister has a rich social life and she hangs out with her friends a lot. But at dinner we come together in a mutual unveiling of the veneer of indifference, and there is a collective sense of gratitude in being together.

I'm glad I'm home now more than usual to be present for dinner. 

Day 25/ The Isolation Journals: Objectif

Choose a photograph—maybe you took it, maybe you’re in it, maybe you cut it out of magazine just because it delighted your eye: the point is, the image doesn’t have to be beautiful or good, but you saved it for a reason, right? It means something to you. 

Your job is not to describe the picture. You can—but the point is to let it take you somewhere. How does the photograph make you feel? What does it make you remember? What’s your relationship to the people or place in the picture? And, whether or not you know them, does a story come to mind? If you don’t remember when the photo was taken, that’s fine: let yourself conjecture. What do you imagine happened the moment before or after the click? What might you know about the past or future that the photographer or subject does not? Who isn’t in the picture? What’s just outside the frame, in space or time? If you could, what would you ask the photographer (or subject) now, a day, a month, a decade since the moment held in the frame? Tell us what you believe or fantasize, beginning or ending with the moment that the photo was captured.

And—here’s a bonus: Now that you’ve written about a photo you possess, one you can look at any old time, write about the one you wish had been taken; if only that moment had been captured—but it wasn’t. In this case, with this photo that doesn’t exist—describe it in living color. (Unless, of course, it’s black and white.)

She looks at her hands and briefly pats a section of her fringe against her forehead. The camera man murmurs a preparatory instruction, and she hesitates at what gait to adopt, looks into the lens, slackens the muscles on the inner corners of her eyebrows, allows her cupid's bow to grow taut, her upper lip arching upward only at the sides, and her cheeks swell as the skin around her nose pulls outwards like her heart always does, although that uncontained capacity for love does not appear in her eyes like it does when she laughs. When she really laughs. When even in dark pupils one can see an embrace that swirls like yin and yang, when the musical tone of happiness and things undiscovered leaves her lips and lets itself be glimpsed for just a moment, to only those who pay attention, to only those who extend their fingers to the dew on the grass and believes in lives once lived and places of true origin. 

She has given me many things. The first which were perceived even by distant relatives were her eyes, etched onto my face as an eternal blessing, as the brutal and beautiful instrument with which I'd see. Eyes... eyes that were meant for much laughter as well as many tears. Eyes whose trail inland towards the temples cupped both sunlight and rain, gets eroded and deepened, was itself a distinctive stroke in the scripture which bodies become. 

I know the mechanisms to bring about the exact smile in this image. Know how the indent under the eyes feel, the curvature of the lower lid, a placement unconsciously created and habituated. A result of some sort of inner tug-of-war against absolute outpouring and well-measured guardedness, a kind of resignation that settles in the middle but gazes always in the direction of hope and affection. 

In French, another word for lens is 'objectif', suggesting truth and impartiality.

Day 24/ The Isolation Journals: Breath

Because breathing is essential for life, it touches every part of our existence. What does it mean to you to breathe? When was the last time you really noticed your breath? What were you doing? Was there ever a time when you realized you had taken your breath for granted?

It is no revelation, the debate between me and my lungs. When life decided to have me in the world I emerged toes first, upside down–– from the onset gravity decided to make oxygen quite valuable. The memory of tracing the scar on my mother's lower abdomen is as blurry as the impact asthma had on me in my childhood, although I seem to have a natural inclination towards the taste and exhaust of an inhaler, being I suppose, especially fresh, particularly relieving, even life-giving. 

The condition magically disappeared, and I was able to live asthma-free. That said I always have an inkling that the frame of the ribcage, the muscles about the heart, and the susceptibility of the lungs to the essential respiratory element was defective from the start and always will be. I still can't breathe fully, sometimes just to feel like I'm getting remotely enough air I grind my molars together and strain my sternum upward. Sometimes it's true; that this is a result of poor posture and bad habits. Other times, those are only supposable aggravations to the fundamentally flawed system.

Such difficulty is often alleviated by a run or a deep yoga practice. I began properly loving running since about 13 or 14 years old, about a year into the slew of teenage pressure on appearance, and as I met Sidney whom I ran with every weekend. As the secondary school workload got tough and body image ideals persisted, I ran more to alleviate the stress. I ran rounds around my school in the early mornings, loved the blue tone cast by the rising sun, and the wind of dawn chilliness through my hair and into my nostrils. When I run, there is less the perception of breathing being hard because well, breathing does get hard. To heave and puff are uncomfortable yes, sometimes dreadful, but that often clears my pathways, is finally enough aggression for the air to be pushed through my lungs. 

As for yoga, I'd only recently started practicing regularly and intentionally. Instead of spurring my body forward in bursts, yoga opens me up; sends my muscles reaching outwards before quivering and delivering an exhale, forces the blood to travel to the tippy points of the parts I rarely reach for and with that coaxes my heart to pump a little harder, smoother, with the caress like that of human hands around a newly born kitten. 

As the world struggles against a terrifying threat towards that which we thought was our own, embedded in some biological right to the individual, I pray that they receive the respite that I feel when I can expel so deep an exhale I feel the weight lifted off my temples. I pray that they'd trust their heart, their lungs, their ribcage, their muscles, and all the tiny networks of lifelines that course through the flesh. I pray that they'd emerge, even if feet first, and that when they walk out of the doors of that terror they'd still remember the tightness around their chest and with me, sigh at the privilege of being able to breathe. 

Day 23/ The Isolation Journals: Hibiscus Neighbourhood

Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.

This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”

Roundabouts to clay-made happiness

tadpoles at 7 

(and at 16)

Training wheels to the fear of falling

(ripened to haphazardness, powdered over self-illusion).

The floor plan

rooms with no designation

Mama, 你对我失望吗？

Hair like the flowers she so liked

White ones that hung downward like fairy bells

It was where I learned to cry hiding my face
Feigning sleep

Choked so much on the humidity my nose bled

My nose always bled

It was where I recognised the taste of iron

and not of chilli padi

Mama did not tell me

Yeye, 我还记得你的微笑。

Grief never leaves,

makes your body home.

I still love fantasies

and flowers;

On the other side of the river

a little further inland

I moved in synchrony to the sound of drums

and held my aunt's hand as she wept

sliding each bead, one after the next

ah mi tuo fo ah mi tuo fo ah mi tuo fo-

Six four four two four four

I made my first yahoo account here.

Screamed till I was hoarse

Quack! Meow!

kicks and flings to avoid the shower.

Millipedes just past the backyard

Falling into the drain

You loved me, didn't you?

Ran right over

I miss a possibility

Locked in the bathroom

I stole a birthday gift

and other things

I save my chicken wing

falling, avoiding a cockroach in the dark.

I cast aside with strokes on my hand.

(I am just as confused a girl

just as feeling

just as hurting)

my body is home

Yi Cheong used to bring me around the neighbourhoods to pick flowers.

There were some that were poisonous,

and some that were purple, yellow,

some pink hibiscus.

A tone of sepia

mixed of memory and the setting sun

past the flowers, she rode her bike away

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Romania. 1975.

Madrid. 1933.

Untitled. Tamil Nadu, India. 1950.