if the soul

It was years ago, back in the first workplace, when i first encountered this poem. A friend showed it to me during a conversation that must have been about music and literature -- but i can't remember exactly. i wasn't too impressed at the time, but somehow, the images of limpets and rock pools have stayed with me all these years. Was reminded of it yesterday, and have read it several times since. i'd never really noticed its fierce, elegiac beauty before. The more i read it, the more i like it.
.
And i don't even know the title...
.
---------------------------------
.
.
If the soul of my dead father remembers anything
he will remember the rake of these rock pools, the lean
of their stacked lines, he will note limpets and shrimps
and know this umbrella mist as it falls lightly as drizzle.
.
If he remembers anything he will hear the clipped whisper
of the waves on the turn, here where he used to swim
far out as if -- I wonder now -- it was his only solitude.
I suppose a soul from this place will hear the gulls squeaking
.
and have no argument with high-sighted oblique storms.
'High tides are expected,' a woman said to me today,
my father's soul will want to be here, in the spray
and in the gale, in the storm's uncompromising rage.
.
.
i.m. Albert Hart
.
.
(David Hart)
.
.

from the heart

So here's a radical idea: schools should just measure academic achievement. i get alarmed whenever (well-meaning) civil servants and educationists talk about factoring things like lifeskills and ethics into our school assessment systems. i mean, sure, i know where they're coming from. They're frustrated with the over-emphasis on academic results as a way of 'measuring' our students; they're concerned about 'holistic education'. They want our education system to produce more 'well-rounded' students. All good and noble intentions, it must be said.
.
Here's the thing, though. Some things in life are simply unquantifiable. Try to put a number to them, and the whole thing just degenerates into a farcical and meaningless, not to mention time-wasting, exercise in futility. (i remember the time when we had to test our students on 'teamwork' and cooperativeness in Project Work. At its worst, we were instructed to note whether or not students smiled and nodded at each other during group meetings to acknowledge their team-members' contributions. No kidding. It was ridiculous.) Assessing our students on Lifeskills? Like, grading them on whether they can cook a decent meal without using Maggi Mee? Giving them a Resilience Score based on how well they bounce back from a poor test result? The mind boggles.
.
The problem with this is that it treats only the symptoms of a deeper problem -- which is the belief that everything in life can be and ought to be quantified. It is essentially a materialist worldview -- one which has no place for the intangible things of the spirit. The solution to stressed-out students who feel that there is an over-emphasis on academic results in our education system is not to factor a wider range of skills and aptitudes etc into the assessment process. The solution is to show people that school results -- of whatever kind -- are not the be-all and end-all of life. It is to persuade them that some things, some of the most important things, simply cannot and should not be quantified. It is to protect as many things as possible from the encroachment of The System, rather than to try to Systemetise as many things as possible -- which is what we seem to be doing now.
.
Of course, such a solution would never work here in Singapore. i'm not sure if there's any place where it would work, but definitely not here. C'est la vie.
.
.

tak boleh

Ok. So there was no miracle. But still. There is change. However gradual, it is still change. And that, at least, is something.
.
.

malaysia boleh?

Malaysia went to the polls today (ok, well, technically, it was yesterday...) and for some strange reason i'm getting swept along in the excitement. Haven't felt so alive in months.
.
.

imagine

"... The ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas, or even to discredit them. It is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present. Its task, in brief, is to annihilate that perilous power known as the imagination."
.
(Terry Eagleton)
.
.
Something for us to think about here in Singapore. So often, i hear people lamenting The System, and yet the very things they do are feeding into The System and making things worse. We simply don't see that there can be an alternative, and if we do see it, we often don't have the courage to pursue it. i think, what this island needs more than anything else is, first, imagination, and then, courage.
.
The Serenity Prayer comes to mind. That, and also John Lennon's 'Imagine'.
.
.

farewell, and farewell, and farewell

That by-now-familiar feeling -- bracing the heart for yet another round of farewells.
.
-----------------------
.
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
.
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.
.
Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,
.
Are sages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being
.
Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,
.
The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
.
Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.
.
.
(XVI, from Dark Harbour, by Mark Strand)
.
.