The annotated budak

Super troupers

There is a strain of thought that regards the island's surviving professional wayang troupes as antiquated creatures living on borrowed time, staid relics of history who cling to the past with no hope of a future. In contrast, assemblies of amateurs are feted for their dedication to new scripts, embrace of fresh approaches and displays of technical prowess. Having neither the linguistic mettle nor the aesthetic wit to judge the tapestry of this musical dialectic, ducks can offer no disagreement with established claims that societies of part-time performers enjoy higher standards, superior access to funds and a constant renewal of creative energies fuelled by private dedication to the craft and personal investments in operatic livery.

In this worldview, the few who still eke a living from the art of their forefathers offer a sorry sight. Their costumes are as old and daggy as the practitioners, who know in their hearts a mighty handful of tales but little more than the songs of their youth and the lore of their apprenticeship. These troupes, which once held sway over tropical nights and commanded the strength of pan-Malayan unions, now pay the price of professional privilege, lacking the wiles and will to woo worldly councils with sweet words and elevated visions in the language of administrative persuasion. Tradition also stands on flimsy scenes, offering mere sketches and loose outlines that rely on improvisatory whim rather than the rigour of formal rehearsal. The street holds no candle to the stage, for one can well afford to advance the art with injections of foreign talent, while the other merely bears the burden of a choice to give it all to a vocation well past its peak. For who in his right mind would choose a life on the edge of sustenance over the leisure of subsidised acclaim?

This dichotomy of artistic merit, which appears to favour permanent arenas over the planks of wayside theatres, sheds scant light on the way reenactments of worn yarns serve less the sensibilities of mortal men than the demands of immaterial lords. Dilettantes probably have no time for the thankless chores of the taoist calendar or the paltry budgets of temples and minor clans with little to offer but space for a ramshackle stage and the devotion of a night or two to the amusement of implacable deities. Photographers are also drawn to these acts of ritual like bugs to an incomprehensible bulb, but they, too, have no answer to why the troupes stick to their guns amid a barrage of disparagement from the powers-that-be and those who play only to the gallery. Is it kinship, a reluctance to breach rules of spiritual protocol or simply a gesture of kindness to obsolete souls that feeds the remaining strains of Teochew heard from the grounds of shrines at pains to honour their ancestors? Personal edification has no place in these tired liturgies, which aim to please none but the need to know that the past persists in the present. Some patrons now attempt to balance heaven and earth by giving a portion of festivities to evergreen crowd pleasers. But to a few of the faithful, such displays, which no doubt fatten the coffers of secular bodies, heighten the dilemma of those who'd question the wisdom of a leap of fate from what is rite to what amounts to a roaring revelry of song.

Slab in the face

Waterloo Street, Singapore.

The concept of memory we rely upon… arguably originates with Aristotle who conceived of our awareness of what is past or passing as traces or imprints inscribed into the slabs of wax that constitute memory in our minds. Hobbes’ and Locke’s arguments for the mind as a tabula rasa, and Freud’s conception of the psyche as a ‘mystic writing pad’ are variations and a continuation of this Socratic solution of memory as the imprinting (typos) or incising of images onto the waxy surface of our minds or souls. The current metaphor of this concept of mind is that our thoughts proceed like a computer operation. Incoming thoughts are stored as neural symbols in the brain not dissimilar to data stored as bytes in the hard drive of a computer…

For Descartes our mind was some kind of porous entity through which visceral ‘animal’ spirits flowed, animating our persona. This Cartesian theory of animal spirits driving our mind was evidently loathsome to his critics who dedicated much of their time to exorcising what the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle termed ‘the ghost in the machine’.

For Descartes, our ‘memory’ is not imprinted into our brain and reinforced by various mnemonic systems. Memory, for Descartes, flowed and is distributed through our mind, blending with other memories in a shifting mixture. Our ‘spirits’ drive our thoughts and memories through the networks of our brain, causing them to reconstitute and create new pathways in which to flow. Today we recognise that Descartes may be right, that our brain can be modelled as a complex weave of multilayer networks. These networks consist of interconnected processing units similar to, or a simplified version of, the neurons or cellular elements of our brains that are stimulated by incoming and inhibitory signals leading to an output. These networks change and are reconfigured in response to incoming signals…

Golden Bell Mansion, Mount Faber.

From our present, in an increasingly fragmented but interconnected global world, we perceive not one eternal past, but fragmentary, different pasts which we have fleeting memories of in an eternal ‘virtual reality’ present. We need not one road to our past. But a network to link us to different pasts which we are connected to from our virtual present. Our concept of what it means to remember our pasts in cyberspace is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence are leading us to model our cognitive processes as a connectionist or parallel distributed processing computer architecture. Our memories of our different pasts are more like the computer files we can move around in the ‘hard disc’ of our brains to merge with other ‘files’ to form new memories or be deleted. How we relate to others will also change as we move into ‘virtual communities’ in cyberspace. We will also need to revise our concept of shared and collective memories with others in their ‘virtual communities’ which Howard Rheingold, a leading futures thinker, defines as: “Social aggregations that emerges from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.”

Kwa Chong Guan (2008). “Oral Histories in the Making of Our Memories and Heritage”, in Asian Journal of Social Science 36, 1–17.

Cut and paste

The past shenanigans of this island-city, which upon closer inspection beg little to differ from the present state of social displacement and economic servitude, are charted in low life perspectives by a certain high-falutin opus that failed to obtain syndication in journals of public interest. Gentle(men) readers who come across page 337 of said tome, however, are likely to suffer a dehabilitating round of blues owing to the otherwise duely diligent authors' neglect in explaining the inner workings of a device known as the Dutch pessary, or more crudely, as the 'cap-and-paste.'

In happier times when respectable ladies sat in gharries while their men rode roughshod over lesser nations, a squire who harboured second thoughts of his ability to be a sire might employ the unreliable if rather visually arresting tactic of withdrawing his weapon from active duty moments before the final thrust. Those who could afford to amused their partners by donning sheaths that trapped their seed in a skin of sheep guts.

Meanwhile, dames who desire a life of greater leisure would insert fruit jellies, pastes and other tarty juices into their chambers to thwart whatever comes their way. There were also other, more hazardous, methods involving sponges and creams laced with formulas potentially fatal to both sperm and spouse. In the 1880s, Dr C. Hasse, a German doctor, invented a cervical cap that women could insert into their womb to save them from the trouble of men who like bare backs or shoot too soon. The diaphragm, and its later upgrades, also became known as the Dutch or Mensinga pessary, as Dr Hasse took credit for his genius under the pseudonym, Wilhelm Mensinga. 

The Dutch, who for centuries have faced the dilemma of having potentially too many people on too little land, were scandalously tolerant of family planning in the early 20th century. This liberal bias was not shared by other nations. In America, the Comstock Laws of 1873 forbade the dissemination of contraceptive information. As late as the early 1910s, one Dora Sanger was forced to flee the land of the free for promulgating the obscene notion that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." Sanger found her way to Holland, where she became convinced of the superiority of the diaphragm to the suppositories and douches used by her contemporary countrywomen. She then wrote a pamphlet, "Dutch Methods of Birth Control," outlining the numerous means by which the Dutch prevent their nation from overrunning the world. On the Dutch pessary (which it seems was available in a number of sizes), this is what she had to say:

"The pessary Mensinga (price 50 cents) is a simple ring closed by an indiarubber membrane curved like hemisphere... Generally the pessary is moistened with the same liquid which is used as an injection [a fluid, usually highly acidic, which ladies in Sanger's time literally injected with a glass syringe into their vaginas after sex to act against both conception and venereal contagion]; but on the first occasion, and always when the pessary is introduced with difficulty, the genital parts must be moistened with white soap to render them slippery. When a wife is measured for a pessary she should be at her ease, undressed, without her stays, in the stooping or cowering position, and thighs apart... To place the pessary, it is pushed vertically into the longitudinal opening of the vulva."

Sanger adds, pointedly:

"The method which we mention for the use of women has great advantage of permitting her to be free from care during the night; and it is also an essential point that the husband need not be consulted in the matter. If these instruments are well placed, the husband cannot perceive their employment by the wife. It is also requisite that the method does not at all annoy the wife; if they produce the slightest pain, it is because they are either ill-chosen or misplaced."

Though she shared much of Sanger's goals, Constance Goh, the subject of the frustrating page 337, thought rather less of the pessary. The founder of Singapore's first family planning clinic in 1949 deemed the 'cap and paste' a "very messy, troublesome, very expensive" contraceptive. But it was still the best available option, as she explained, "It was very difficult to persuade men to use condoms. Most men thought only of their own pleasure. They thought their fun might be spoiled, their health injured."

For her efforts to help families break out of the poverty cycle, Goh (a devout Presbyterian) was sent to hell twice a month by the Catholic Church until the 1960s, when a certain Mr Lee threw in his lot with the mission of her clinic.

It's far easier to make love without making babies these days, unless you are a teenager so convinced of the inefficacy of condoms that you prefer the greater power of a pledge. Diaphragms and douches, though, have gone the way of the non-avian dinosaur, save in a growing movement to reduce the footprint of monthly discharges. Of course, all this is moot to ducks that can only shoot a quiverfull of blanks and threaten the maidenhood of small furry mammals. Isn't it time to put to bed the irate vanity that every sperm is sacred and every spill is waste?

Red lantern day

Banners and lanterns from another age welcome visitors to Pulau Ubin from May Day to Saturday next, when the parinirvana of the gentlest sage is greeted by the islanders. Year after year, they celebrate the serene monk as well as the grand old man of the southern seas with colours that know neither marketed coordination nor the artifice of city planners. Timeless acts of stagecraft, alas, now make way for folksy singers who will entertain a host of souls and spirits two Wednesdays hence. On these evenings of devotion, the surly boatmen will ferry thee for free and villagers past and present will remember the days when gods roamed the earth and beastly things prowled the dark to probe and prey upon the weak and wilder recesses of merely human natures.

Hourt break

A man named Aki Ra wages a solo war against the landmines that maim his countrymen in the name of a cause as righteous as death. At his side was a young lady who was won over by his passion and pain, and who joined Aki Ra in a mission of mercy. An hour's drive by jeepney on a dusty road from Siem Reap, the Cambodia Landmine Museum houses mementos of killing fields and shelters the orphans of families splintered by shrapnel. Aki Ra now works alone again, in the company of grief and the children who laughed off lost limbs and a life of disability to battle history with defiant hope.

Film no evil

Yawning Bread has a thoughful review of the film "The Last Communist" on his site. In the meantime, I am still trying to gather information on the botanical and pharmacopeial differences between petai papan, petai kacang and petai padi.

As with some earlier movies like Schindler's List, this film (and its published precedent "Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History") is confronting a kind of idiocy rife in Malaysia that regards it as preferable to see, hear and speak of no evil rather than to have an open examination of its contexts and retelling of  its lessons. It appears that the sensitivities of individuals who have undoubtedly suffered as a result of the communist insurgency must be mollified to the extent that independent perspectives of that era must be suppressed. Not that there are many non-independent accounts for that matter; the insurgency warranted no more than a few vague paragraphs during my entire 11 years of education in Malaysia. 

One can sympathise with those who have suffered as a result, directly or indirectly, from Chin Peng's acts, but there is also a need for people today to know about, understand and analyse Chin Peng's origins, thoughts, ideology and historical context, lest a vital part of the nation's history be suppressed simply because some think it's too painful to even mention it. There's nothing to prevent survivors from speaking out to rebut Chin Peng's claims, highlight atrocities committed by the Malayan Communist Party or spotlight the sacrifices of communities and individuals at the forefront of the counterinsurgency efforts.  Don't Malaysians deserve (or are they deemed too immature still?) at least an airing from all participants that sheds light on an episode that shaped the country's political directions in no small way? Or at the very least, might journeys such as Amir's lead to a pondering of how the soul of a nation has changed and inspire watchfulness against the banality of an evil with unassuming origins?