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Singapura (The World Is Yours Now)

Three-Year Plan

Since Wednesday, I’ve settled on a direction and an approach. It was always a bit hazy and unclear for me before, what I was going to do with this writing, what it meant to me, and what I was going to do, but I think there are some definite answers now. Not every answer, mind you, but answers enough for me to move on.

In that spirit, I’ve found a new sense of imperative and have started on a new project. This project currently goes under the working title of Singapura, and as I’ve decided to tell most people, I’ll tell you that it is based in Singapore, it has a love story somewhere inside, and it is currently being worked on. The last thing you already know, but I just wanted to to get a little practice at delivering that line.

I can’t tell you much more for now except for the fact that it’s very early days and I really have nothing more than a few paragraphs and some vague ideas. I will say that I have a pretty clear idea of how it begins and ends, so it’s really a matter of trying to figure out what happens in between.

It is remarkably different from The River, in a sense, because I don’t have it planned in detail. In a sense, things are not so set-in-stone, and I’m kind of taking it as it comes with the confidence that the experience gained from writing The River and the strength of the concept are going to pull me through. I’m reasonably confident, and fairly excited about this, but then again, all new projects tend to be exciting.

I have it mapped out in the short term (well, relatively, anyway) and I hope to have it in good shape by my 25th birthday. That gives me about two to three years to hammer it into shape, which is far more time than I afforded The River. I also realise that it’s a little after I graduate, so I guess I can consider Singapura something of a thesis project.

In the meantime, I’ll still be touching up on The River. I also won’t be opposed to diving into other projects, though I suspect Singapura will take up the bulk of my creative energy.

It seems unlikely but I hope to have more to tell you about it soon.

Tempered Radicals

It ought to then be a happy time, bubbling with exuberance and positivity for the future. Just yesterday, though, my mother told me that they asked my father to retire.

There is a strange contradiction of emotions here, and it’s hard to explain. Hard to describe, even.

One moment, you’re going, I’m gonna’ take over the world, I’m gonna’ do this, I’m gonna’ do that. And then the next, you find that the keepers of the world are stepping down and they’re telling you, This world is yours now. So, alone and in a slight state of shock, you start to think about those ambitions you had before, and then you see that you have the world in your hands and you don’t know what to do with it. And it makes you scared.

That’s kind of what it feels like.

To be fair, the shock probably comes from how I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon, and also how there wasn’t much in the way of a warning. Yet, it goes slightly deeper because everything now seems more tenuous and far less secure than it used to be. I’m sure if I knew what exactly was going to happen, it’d be slightly better. No one has said a word to me yet. I haven’t asked. I know they’ve plans of some sort. I wonder what they are.

To be honest, I don’t even know exactly when my father will stop working.

There is a deeper fracture in this, mainly in that it returns me to the choice between pursuing the arts and getting a steady job. Sure, they’re not exclusive, and it’s all a little hard to explain, and I expect plenty of people to make their assumptions and say, That’s not a problem; you can have both, but that’s not really what I mean.

To condense this and not turn it into a whiny post, let’s just say that I think there is a certain pressure, in actually ‘getting serious’ about one of them. A choice, in that sense. It doesn’t mean that I have to give up one or the other, but I don’t believe that it’s possible for me to set myself up to take on both. And in that, questions start piling up, like if writing is all it’s cooked up to be, then why is it that whenever I make up my mind to do something about it, to work on it, I feel like I’m letting somebody down? And if that’s the case, what does it really mean to me?

The questions have always been there. The answers are not always obvious, if they should exist at all. I think this new development tempers the world-conquering positivity I was having just a couple of days ago with a sharp tug at my ankles, dragging me back to the dirt. The imperatives and priorities have shown up to remind me that they haven’t gone away, and the questions still need answering.

Did I get answers back then? I thought I did. Now I can’t be sure.

The problem is, I could actually make something out of this, or my blind faith could really just be the only thing keeping me from recognising that I’m just a clown. I can’t tell. Taken that way, the arts seem like a gamble at best, and a childish idealism at worst. And I think I’ve just run out of time and the world is not going to wait any longer for me to grow up.

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© 2008 a modest odyssey.