Note of Appreciation

This was supposed to be posted long ago but back then, I was inevitably busy with other worldly engagements. I hereby apologize for the delay and hence would like to forward my utmost appreciation to my closest college pal, Kean Jean for making my 21st birthday an exceptionally remarkable one! Pleasantly surprised, I was in total disbelieve to receive his ‘pre-arrived’ gift parcel — an exquisitely simple yet beautiful Memory Lane card and a copy of Rice’s most lyrically-melancholic album to date! What more to ask?! It was altogether too effortless and undeserving! Needless to say, I am most grateful and emotionally overwhelmed.

To my ‘long-disconnected’ ex-mates, Zhen Hui, Li Xiang and Guna, I sincerely thank you for the much surprising belated birthday dinner. I am most appreciative of your time and resources spent in making arrangement for the gathering. Also, special dedications to Wei Ping, Xuan Jing, Erny, Wen Shaur, Adrian, Kye, Alexel, Calvin and many others for your wonderful greetings and wishes on friendster or through SMS. Last but not least, I would like to convey my heart-felt thanks to everyone and may this joy be shared with all beings, near and far, unconditionally out of good faith, love and compassion. Sadhu!

"Look outside the sun is bursting through… filling up this room”

- Bic Runga, Bursting Through

The Hours of Ours

After months of reading, I have eventually come to the final pages of Cunningham’s most masterful piece of literature to date. Subsequent to winning a consolation prize from the college inter-school book review competition, I was rewarded a RM50 MPH voucher for which I benefited to purchase a precious copy of The Hours as my 20th birthday gift.

After finalizing with some contemplation on the lucidly composed novel, I then come to understand the underlying essence of it. The 228-pages novel is certainly not less than three intertwining fictions across three different eras. Through close examination, it is a perfect depiction of reality, the insatiable desires in life and the resentment against both; having realized in the hours of an ordinary day.

Nothing is more worthy than the desire to live although delusion may mislead one’s truest survival spirit within. This is evidently represented by all leading characters in the novel. Mentally-destructive Virginia Woolf and the ill-dying Richard Brown both struggle in pain and misery to survive for their supposed worldly responsibilities. Both irresistibly cling on their obsession in writings, subsequently lose their talent, and thus find no value in living whatsoever. Their progress is of mere desperation to attain the unrealized desire, singled by hope to find satisfaction.

In contrary, Laura Zielski, the misrepresented homemaker finds more worth in dying than to live on and fulfill her motherly engagements. Constantly challenged by and deeming herself misfit to the role she is destined to uphold, she questions her functionality and struggles alone with discontentment and insecurity of her current position. While Clarissa Vaughn, Richard’s once-lover irresistibly clings on past happiness and yearns for its reoccurrence, it is altogether most apparent that these characters, even we ourselves seem to have insatiable desires that keep us moving forward but the attachment that generates dis-ease.

Consequently their choices are filled with distress and resentment as they conflict between domestic life and their fantasies. Almost believing that every individual deserves a desired, most extraordinary and exceptional life of their own in search for humanity, they resent the norm for failing them. Nevertheless, they too fail to convince themselves with absoluteness, without disappointment and out of unconditioned satisfactions for the choices made. Happiness sores and love despairs. No justification can seemingly be reached and only they alone can bring out the peace from within.

Perhaps, looking into what Cunningham meant (below), it is just part of life that we do confront such circumstances. It is the denial of this truth that brings about suffering as we hope for and cling on false idea of happiness. Arguing against reality; to insistently live in the dilusion of our self-created, imaginary, and perfected world is what brings about discontentment and suffering. Hence, we fail to live in the present and overlook existing enjoyment that we less value.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts… We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease… There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem… to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagine, though everyone… knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more…”

- extracted from Cunningham’s The Hours (1999)

It is most agreeable that the novel has stimulated a sense of relatedness, using the stream of consciousness to accurately unveil our momentary flashes of thoughts and feelings in writings. Ultimately, it is not the justification of choices that matters, neither the insatiable desires nor the discontentment. It is the reality that has to be realized, the reality that lies in the hours of our lives. Then and only then, will we gain wisdom and find peace within, thus appreciate every moment with real happiness.

(inspired by and dedicated to Kye-Niarchos and C. Alexel, avid fans of The Hours)

An Androgynous Mind

Tilda Swinton, accomplished art house and mainstream actress famously known for her androgynous looks, plays Orlando a young man who transformed into an ageless woman in the gender-bending themed film, Orlando, adapted from Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name

“And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female... The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating... Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine…”

- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Extracted from Virginia Woolf and Her World (1975) by John Lehmann, it was approximately two years ago when I first came across the above passage while reading the said comprehensive biography. I was immediately tempted to conduct some research with the intention to gain insight into the rational of such assertions. From the findings made on this intellectually written extended-essay, I learnt that Woolf has attempted, without fail, to highlight the potentialities of a fully cultivated mind that is apparently androgynous in nature.

She progresses on six chapters for which she points out in agreement with Coleridge’s view concerning the supremacy of an androgynous mind. Notably, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the prominent Romantic poet and philosopher that advocate the concept of an androgynous mind. They both share a common idea that an androgynous mind is present when one is working at the absence of sex-consciousness, thus producing output at its highest capacity, without impediment and free from gender-biasness.

Woolf’s primary intention is to mold a character that possesses both masculine and feminine feature in a harmonious blend. She realizes that female writers are not given the resources and avenue to explore their subjects and techniques, forcing them to conform to social norms and expectation of the typical themes among female writers during the time. It has therefore led to radical feminist movement which often jeopardizes the neutrality of view in the writings made.

This further suggests that the society in this ‘sex-conscious’ era are working with prejudice in defending their superiority or wrestling against their inferiority. While granting rights to uphold equality may potentially promote exploitation, intellectual work suffers too by the influence and constrain of gender sensitivities. These cumulatively result in effort not properly channeled towards frank but constructive discussion on gender concerns for the growth of humanity at large.

In contrast, an androgynous mind, according to Woolf, finds objectivity in its relation with ‘reality’. Hence, it is not concerned with ‘itself’, but with its subject, independently. It is an approach of thinking that allows women and by implication men or vice versa, to write as themselves, still in a sexed body, but without the presence of prejudice that is linked to the body. In other words, to write without consciousness of sex is to see the piece of work for itself not as its author.

Woolf’s work however receives endless criticisms for the inherently ambiguous concept of androgyny is a subject of vast interpretations, and has been approached from various ideological angles. Some accuse her ideology as promoting biological dynamism; the belief that when sex is turned into a more ‘multiple’ or ‘diverse’ category than it has been so far, then social norms will be relaxed. Woolf nevertheless sees the multiplication of the self and celebrating the difference within the self as leading to creativity and freedom from sexual bias in literature, and not in any way liberalising biological dynamism.

Her concept of androgyny is also seen as destructive male-centred self-obsession, arguing that androgyne ‘transgresses the very existence of difference.’ Thus an androgynous mind is said to be narcissistic in which the subject destructs itself. Critics claim that, “Love of self inscribed in its seemingly homogenous unity does not make for glorious difference or internalised heterogeneity, but for a narcissism which cannot create and can only self-destruct.”

Critics have also gone beyond limits by linking Woolf's ideology of an androgynous mind to her sexuality, harshly argue that the concept is a repression of her own female identity. Critics put that her vision of androgyny is a “myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to cloak and repress her anger and ambition.” They further claim the body is something that Woolf fears and androgyny offers the chance to get rid of it.

Others perceive the concept as female-centred and in essence, promoting lesbianism. Woolf has been accused for seducing female audience into sisterhood, inviting them to collude and discuss women and writing in the absence of men. Thus, Woolf’s concept of androgyny is said to privilege the female and symbolically, lesbian. Such strong accusations bring us down to the very argument of the truest implication of Woolf’s androgyny concept from her point of view.

Though the term ‘Androgynous’ is often biologically used to describe individuals that are not distinctly masculine or feminine in appearance or behavior, Woolf takes a step further to examine it at a different angle. Since Woolf dissociates androgynous attributes as asexual (she believes that gender deviation is still important), it is apparent that, in my opinion, her argument revolves more on the ‘functioning qualities’ of an androgynous mind, a fusion that eradicates gender-consciousness.

Note that it does not imply an absolute absence of gender. Difference is to be celebrated still, but 'should exist within the individual androgynous self-fertilising mind', thusly achiving an androgynous mind that is united. Woolf highlights this point by asking,“What does one mean by ‘the unity of the mind’? She then points out, "The power of the androgynous mind lies in its ability to alternate simultaneously between a million different subject positions preserving heterogeneity at the same time as giving the impression of unity".

The degree of success in creating a pure and fully productive androgynous mind as advocated by Woolf is rebuttable. Nevertheless, Woolf’s honest intention is still unaltered; to promote a constructive creative force that eliminates gender stereotype, discrimination and prejudice in literature. Therefore it is never meant to instil colourless homogeneity, self-dissolution, fear of the body or narcissistic death. Woolf asserts that, “androgyny is the capacity of a single person of either sex to embody the full range of human character traits, despite cultural attempts to render some exclusively feminine and some exclusively masculine”.

Therefore extending the concept to the society at large, the wholesomeness of an androgynous mind could be made practical by cultivating a culture of awareness towards the transcendental, unbiased, and perpetuating mind of gender-fused. It is hence believed that individuals that promote a fusion of both masculine and feminine traits in mind will be able to jointly support and co-operate effectively. In that, attributes which are egoistic in nature, i.e. self-righteousness must be combined with considerable amount of sensitivity, compassion and understandability. Emotionally-charged qualities must in contrary, be neutralized through the instilment of objectivity, decisiveness and wisdom. Ultimately, the ability to access this ‘full range of character traits’ may be a rare commodity, perhaps logically impossible but not an unreasonable pursuant. An androgynous mind remains an idealistic concept, the highest form of attainment by any writer that aspires to be gender-less in mind.

“Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create (?), any more than a mind that is purely feminine…”

Path to Fruition

Prologue
This, being the ambitious attempt to start a blog was long contemplated but little endeavors were present towards realization. It was until I happened to visualize that the potentialities of my limited yet invaluable spiritual knowledge being translated as a ‘Path to Fruition’. Path to Fruition is hence an experimental, holistic medium aimed at sharing views, thoughts and ideas, as well as practical knowledge and experiences towards spiritual development. Articles, reviews, analysis and commentaries soon to be found here are largely improvisations, while some on existing intellectual materials of deemed credibility. Thusly any inaccuracy or misinterpretation of facts, information, judgement, opinions, etc is subjected to as accidental or inherent erroneous.

Hereby I would like to encourage my dear readers to keep an open and questioning mind in assessing the validity and efficacy of any claims, theories or methodologies set here, firmly believing that we should all maintain an attitude of curiosity, be experimental and explorative and not quick at accepting information being authentic and dependable simply out of faith, fancy, oral tradition, theorising or considered acceptance of a view - Canki Sutta (MN 95). Perhaps and most appropriately, to travel the Path to Fruition requires one to be wise, analytical and selective in pruning only the factors that are conducive towards our often unique spiritual practices.

P.S: ‘Jin-almahdi Kilulu’ is merely a pseudonym. It is not, by itself, an alter-ego or another self-created entity. Simply, it is a means to articulate my affection towards life and spirituality. Therein (the pseudonym) lies a value most virtuous that reflects the attribute of sacredness. Originate from an Arabic term, ‘Al-Mahdi’ denotes the act of guiding one to the right path while the word ‘Kilulu’ is inspired by the name of a victimized African child character in the critically-acclaimed and humanity-themed motion picture, The Constant Gardener. The message that underlies is most evident; the realization of both wisdom and compassion; the fundamentals of every religion.