I watched Cloud Atlas (2012) four years ago. I know I have a habit of delaying my movie reviews, writing them years after I watched them. But that movie gave me the inspiration to become an author.
My interpretation of Cloud Atlas is that you will never know if you work of creation would indirectly be used to advance the human collective. It starts with a 18th century gay composer, wrote his symphony and committed suicide shortly after although he knew his lover was looking for him. In a dramatic twists and turns of the event, at the final futuristic scene of the movie – it was his symphony that lead to a rebellion and creation of a new world as it passes one time line to the next in different forms.
Cloud Atlas is hard to understand and digest, in fact it would be one of the most complicated movies to analyse after The Matrix and Inception. It fundamentally answers the question – what is the meaning of life, and what is it for the future generation?
In the Hourglass series that I write, I am attempting to contribute to the human collective through my research and writing in the espionage thriller genre. It seems insignificant and even foolish to dedicate my prime years to this task. I could otherwise be using the time to generate more income, assets and material acquisitions to better my lifestyle and travel more. But, to me it makes perfect sense as it would be the Hourglass Series that will stand the test of time and not my videos, audio or blog. It would be in novel form that it will be preserved and last a century or beyond.
But a thousand years? Maybe not. My cousin and I had a discussion that the history that we know a thousand years ago is mostly lost by now. Looking at how insignificant our human lives are, writing a novel is just a small feat compared to the contributions one can possibly make to humanity.
Cloud Atlas is one such contribution, it may not be fully understood now but it would be one of those classic movies that would be referred to be cited as a catalyst to something else a hundred years from now.
I had started writing the outline for Purple Python, the third book to the installment of the Hourglass Series. It will be from Jessica point of view, she is half Vietnamese, half American.
As part of my research into the horrors of the Vietnam war, I had watched Miss Saigon at West End in London. I had downloaded a book called Unwanted – A memoir of childhood by a Amerasian survivor of the Vietnam war. His chilling depictions of the final days before the last planes leaving Vietnam had lead me to shake my mind off it and write this post. My hair stood on ends when he wrote about how the last planes left the US embassy without his family in Vietnam when they lost the battle to the communist.
On hindsight, I am very very fortunate not to experience any horrors of war in my lifetime. My ancestors had made a good decision to depart China during the civil war and migrate to Nanyang and resettle to new unknown lands. They contributed to the community by teaching, volunteering at the clan association and resettling other families. They made contributions to the society at large by imparting Confucius ideology for a civil upright society.
Now, my generation enjoys global mobility and interconnection with the world due to technological advancement in communications and accessibility. I had the privilege to study in Australia and attain fluency in English as my native language. It was only in Australia I discovered about Vietnamese refugees and how they were referred to as “boat people” and how they risked their lives to go on boats to seek refuge in Australia. I was so insulated and I had no awareness that this existed till I traveled and was exposed to the world at large.
I am now using Alan Watt’s “90 Day Novel” as my guide to write Purple Python as it has worked so for my first two books. It examines through the process of inquiry to building worlds and characters. A sentence that really hits me now is that, “the story lives fully within yourself.” I had never believed in that, I had thought that the story is constructed outside myself. But now, I had discovered this sentence is true. The whole universe of the Scarlet Queen and Hourglass Series is existing within myself and through a process of rigorous inquiry, that it would be materialized in this world.
I am now on Day 5 out of Day 90. I will be on a cruise for a year end vacation with my family and friends in a large group including my grandparents. On the four day cruise with no internet connection, I will continue to be engaged in the inquiry as it says to “write daily and not stop”.
I had made changes to my diet depending on my productivity for the day. I would notice my food intake when I feel tired, and when I just switch off and can’t think anymore. I have added bananas as my breakfast and seen that it prevents after lunch sugar crash. I would notice how my sleep is disrupted by the effects of caffeine if I had too many cups by the results of my Mi Band. The moment I feel tired about (5 -6pm) I would get up from my chair and go for brisk walking, do a dance workout and get moving.
My conclusion is that our energy and productivity levels are influenced by what we eat. After having a rich yummy dessert with friends on Saturday, I crashed from the overload of sugar and was unable to exercise but sleep it off. I am on a no sugar diet, and any sudden intake of sugar = crash. Most food don’t look appetizing to me after switching to this diet. I no longer have cravings for ice cream or chocolate. I find desserts too sweet, and when it tastes too sweet it gets disgusting and yucky.
My constant craving right now is for coffee. I guess I can’t kick the caffeine habit after living in Melbourne. Melbourne was the cafe capital of the world and the coffee, even those at secluded alleys with no advertisements but a coffee machine – they tasted heavenly. The best coffee in Melbourne was a sandwich shop owned by an Egyptian near Little Collins Street. He had no signboards for his coffee but he sells hundreds of cups a day. I had noticed more people buy his coffee than his sandwiches for a strange reason. There was always someone queueing at the sandwich counter while he brewed a coffee. I had tried every coffee on that street and I made the jump for his. He revealed to me the secret of his coffee is in the beans, his beans are a special blend. He asked if I would like to buy his sandwich shop or recommend a buyer so he could retire.
The randomness of this experience opened me up to a whole new world of hidden coffee culture. I got myself a coffee Michelin equivalent guide to Melbourne and hunted down the top 10 cuppas in the city. I self-declared after that I am a coffee connoisseur after completing the guide and having my own rankings and recommendations for others. In my travels, I am the on the hunt for a good cup of coffee. With the exception of China, where tea reigns supreme and dragon well tea is undoubtedly the finest green tea in the world – I am a caffeine addict.
As much as I had tried to kick the caffeine out of my life, it crawls back to my memories. My grandmother would make a tin pot of coffee using a sock as a filter as she poured the concoction from one flask to another. She would do this every morning before we woke up. My cousin and I drank coffee as kids. Everyone in the household was served coffee from the sock. The bitter coffee beans were from Malaysia and it the coffee was creamy with hints of roasted butter, condensed milk that gave a texture of sweetness and a strong aftertaste of milk. Drinking coffee reminds me of my nostalgic memories of my grandmother, who loved coffee and never drank water.
I had written and compiled a poetry book called The Chase which I am intending to release soon on Amazon. The Chase is essentially about my infatuation and loving term loving relationship with science. To put it precisely – physics. When I was a child, I was intrigued by a computer game about the solar planets in our galaxy. I was drawn to the concept of time on our planet – we have 365 days in a year as that’s the amount of time it takes for a planet to orbit the sun. For other planets, they may take days or years to orbit the sun, and if a human is born another planet we would age differently.
I would say I am an atheist at this stage of my life. I have no religion. As Stephen Hawking says in an interview, “”Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.” In my opinion at this stage of my life, science provides the answer to our existence in the grand scheme of the universe. My dad is an atheist as well. God, by definition is our interpretation of it.
“To love another person is to see the face of God.” Victor Hugo
I had expanded on my definition on God to include everything in the universe. To me, that makes perfect sense. When I have a spiritual experience, it is my connection with humanity and all that encompasses in it. Averral is an angelic name bestowed to me by angels on the milky way. My angels in the cosmic flow are watching over me on my journey of creation. I am empowered to make a difference by tapping into the reservoir of possibilities.
In The Chase, it is about my love hate relationship with time. Time will eventually rob us of everything as we know it. My dad says that time stops when one enters the black hole. Death of a galaxy happens when it enters a black hole. All things that start will come to an end. On the book cover of The Chase, I had chosen a picture of a black hole. When writing those poems, I was contemplating about the meaning of life and what is the point of living when it all comes to a definite end. Is our life sole mission to procreate? Or create new worlds that we would never imagine possible? What is it really?
The subscribers to my blog will get an advanced copy of The Chase once it is out, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter and be rewarded.
There is one essential skill I am lacking in my life – control. In a dance, it is all about control of body movements. How good a dancer can be depends on how good he is able to control his motions. In my work, I engage in losing control more than being in control. I lose control to perform in my videos. I lose control to write pages after pages. To me, performance has been about losing control.
But from today onwards, no more.
I had re-defined performance as an act of control. The control of my voice, my movements and my mind. The control over each and every aspect of my work. It has been an insane quantum jump in my usual filming of 5 videos to 16 videos the last session. I intend to bring it to the next level.
I had been working on writing The Prince to completion. I am pleased to say it is almost complete at Part 9. The preliminary drafts are available on my blog, but the final version is elaborately detailed. Researching on monarchs and watching The Crown last night has been inspired me to complete The Prince in a fantasy meets science fiction setting. I can’t wait to release my collection of poetry and short stories on Amazon soon. Stay tuned for the news.
Online communication is an illusion that we know someone, but actually, what we are interacting with is between two screens and it is hardly real. I have to admit my productivity went skyward the moment I started to call, meet and get to know what’s happening on the ground. Things are done at a fraction of the time, and I got to know what is not working or what is working. And I had started to discover that the more acquaintances you have the more lonely you are, and the more close friends you have, the more secure you are. And lastly, closeness to family is what grounds us to who we are.
I am enchanted by historic places. The visit to the Versailles left me in a deep space that the culture of a nation is dependent on the actions of the monarchy. Paris followed the fashion trends of Marie Antoinette for she was the Queen of France. But they abhorred her for she did not socialise with the ladies of the aristocracy that lead to her head being guillotined. Similarly, the Empress Cixi of China loved Chinese Opera and had a theater built in the palace for her to watch the opera lounging beside a window, and following this tradition, they held opera performances in all the districts in China to consolidate their control over their empire through the power of culture.
If I could go back in history, or rewrite history from this point on – I would make BDSM lifestyle a mainstream pursuit. The state of the world today has to do with the construct and introduction of financial markets and globalisation. People spend too much time in pursuing materialistic acquisitions and paying sky high mortgages than do anything meaningful. In this sense, there is a focus on self-inflicting pain and suffering on oneself to achieve material goals instead of the pursuit of pleasure, freedom, and quality of life by investing in relationships. This may not make any sense, but this is something I see very clearly when I travel.
I see the BDSM lifestyle an answer to having liberal attitudes towards sexuality and in this sense, divert the focus away from material acquisitions to investing in quality relationships. Move from the pursuit of pain, to the pursuit of pleasure. Move from loss of control, to total control. Move from misunderstandings, to compromise. I am proposing a wild answer to the state of our existence today, but it has been examined by philosophers such as Rousseau. “‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’
These are the topics I am examining in writing The Prince.
She laid asleep
In a rest she will never wake up from
Yet her boisterous laughter resonates
Her large presence now stilled by the
Silence of the church halls
Maybe maybe she would open her eyes
As youthfulness returns to her pale skin
But she won’t open her eyes no more
They will remain closed, as the coffin encloses her within. Her ashes will burn and she would return to earth without saying goodbye.
Only the living can say, farewell
Farewell farewell. You will be missed.
My grandaunt has been the inspiration behind the White Queen figure. She was plump and had a loud voice. You could hear her voice from below the apartment complex to the top floor. She was the matriarch and was a strong prominent figure in society. She was unabashed about her absurd requests and demands on others. And somehow, everything will go according to her way no matter how impossible it was. She would ask me to call her “grand aunt” in Cantonese and not “auntie”.
Every Chinese new year I would fear meeting her and not getting her name right. She would scream loudly if I got her name wrong. But no matter what, she still gave me a red packet filled with dollar bills. She was proud of her achievements and would announce her entourage of children and grandchildren has arrived in an almost military style fashion in a big group. Yet, she was comical and loved to joke and had a laughter that was unmistakably hers. Around her, she filled the room up with love and concern in her larger than life ways that penetrated walls and defenses. She made everyone feel at ease that with her around, nothing will go wrong and we will be safe and looked after as part of her family.
I watched Cloud Atlas (2012) four years ago. I know I have a habit of delaying my movie reviews, writing them years after I watched them. But that movie gave me the inspiration to become an author.
