"We all need somebody to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.
The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners.
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.
And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."
Unfortunately for me, I fall under the third category, the one with the dangerous situation whereby my feeling of importance has to do with how the eyes of my loved ones see me. When their eyes closes on me, my world turns dark. I was particularly hurt today, over a couple of events. This morning, around 5am, I came to realize that this girl, lets me call her "E" to whom I regarded as a friend had been speaking malicious things about me behind my back. It came as a great shock to me, when "B" messaged me this morning, questioning me in this manner:
B says (
what have u been telling people mr mok wai mun
mok says (
wat?
B says (
about how i supposedly went to
B says (
or...
B says (
about how u rejected me tonnes of times blahblah?
Accordingly to the girls in my group, I have not been myself the past few days. Come to think of that, I did not even realize that myself until I received an encouraging message from Mich today which says:
"pal, u seems to be quite unhappy recent;y, fionn, shanice and me are quite concern abt u... but everybody is packed with projs.. and everybody is having issues with their grps as well.. sigh... fionn n i are drowning w/o u sial... MOK!!! SAVE US!!! heard shanice said u guys tried to talk to Da silva abt changing grp but he refused to help.. sigh...anyway.. dun b 2 upset over others who dunno how to appreciate u.. they'll after everything has ended & when they look back, they'll knw ya a great team player & a great leader! cheers! Mok rocks!"
The girls with me are really sensitive to their surroundings, and I thank them for that. Shanice called me up today and prodded me to share the things that was troubling me and I did. Shanice told me that Celia asked a rhetorical question today: "How come Mok doesn't want to talk to us any more these days?"
Because one can be alone even amongst your friends, your family, your loved ones, thus I have never felt so terribly alone in my life.
I politely decline to join the girls for canteen breaks and with increasing frequency, unconsciously decide to attend afternoon classes, apart from the girls in my group. Kundera describes solitude is a sweet absence of faces. With great conviction, I redefine Kundera's definition of solitude as the sweet absence of familiar faces.
Today while having tea-break, I was sharing with Kath and Fionn some of the problems I had faced this morning, about the rumours spreading around concerning myself. Fionn despite her usual jejuneness, is actually a really good friend, and she told me that 2 other people who had been spreading things about me, were Eugene and Daniel. She claimed that Eugene and Daniel had been bad mouthing a lot of things behind my back. I don't know about the truth of what both Eugene and Daniel spread since Fionn declined to mention the things they said. Probably though, most of the things they think they know about me was from one particular source, a girl who I shall call "F" that I fell out with for various reasons which I do not wish to talk about. I'll give you one really absurd rumour they spread:
That Mok went around smelling (in a perverted sense) the hair of this girl, F.
I am flabbergasted at the thoughtlessness of the joke or rumour. Common, anyone who knows me will know that is absolutely not me, unless I'm suffering from dual personality. I let both Fionn and Kath know that I was really upset over this. In fact, I had been keeping it to myself, hence the unhappiness I was showcasing, unbeknownst even to myself. Fionn was really cool about it. She confronted Daniel and told him to stop spreading malicious gossip about me (Be it truth of lies). Fionn told me when she confronted Daniel, he got angry and scolded Fionn for letting me know about it since it was supposed to be a secret between them. Isn't this really unfair? To gossip/joke nasty things about another person and conveniently decline to take any responsibility for the words you say. It's like going into a restaurant, ordering a would-be feast for yourself and when you are served your meal, you impugn and decline in an upbraid manner from taking any orders. Than you walk away with a contemptuous smirk of a mix of acrimony, condescension, guile, subterfuge and joie de vivre euphrorism on your face. Dis-fukin-gusting.
Here's a quote by David Mitchell pertaining the seeking of truth:
"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."
Likewise, the truth that I approach, the spring within the spring, bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent because I cannot defend myself against an "invisible enemy" unless the protagonist starting these rumours to people unknown to me, comes and settle things out directly with me. You know who you are.
Since, Daniel and Eugene are from the same GM group as me, hence there is very little possible answers as to the purpose of their accusations. So it leaves me with two axioms:
1: They are trying to cause faction within my existing group (since they were bad mouthing to Fionn and Kath)
2: They are innately obtuse and childish (Despite their age) and finds joy at the expense of others
Kundera describes shame as such:
Likewise, it is shameful for me, because I have no choice in the manner in the way the rumours regarding myself spread.
Today, after school, I went to read at Kinokuniya for a few hours- I hang out at Kinokuniya whenever I feel upset/off-tangent. You may think it's silly for me to do that. In my previous post, I was writing my hypothesis about why people are attracted to sad music/stories/people etc.. It is absolutely the same as me. I find solace in reading books that display the same emotional and spiritual level as I carry and amongst the thousands of books there, there's bound to be a few books that I can relate to. One specific book I was desperately trying to find today was Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Today, in school, I had an "Aha" that this was the very book that I needed as my Prozac for my emotional distress. Alas, Kinokuniya ran out of stock of this novel, leaving me doubly disappointed and doubly disillusioned.
I was particularly entranced by this quote in that Kundera Book; It is a good reflection of how I felt today. It goes:
"If Kerenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, 'Look, I'm sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different?' And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."
Happiness is the longing for repetition. To me, repetition and continuity are the same thing. This remind me of how Elliot Perlman in 3 dollars describes continuity/ repetition:
"How good it felt being required to turn up somewhere at a specified time to do something, albeit more mundane and less taxing than anything I had done at university, and be capable of it. To be capable of it, isn't that what everyone wants? Each day, I would say "good morning" to the same people I said it to the day before. There were "in" jokes about the standard of the coffee, the football tipping competition, or somebody's outrageous tie. Lunch was snatched hurriedly from the place next door, a little cafe where the regulars from the department joked with the proprietor and his staff, small jokes, small business, small change, but these people were immensely important to each other. It might be that none of them was aware of their importance, each to the other, and it took me a little while to realize it myself but with each "good morning" they were reminding each other, just slightly, who they were and that they were there.
Continuity in the form of running jokes (never really funny) or repeated themes (never really deep) is reassuring even to people who might not know how much they derive from it and who might even deny that they derive anything at all from it. If they who have never been without it understood its cohesive force, they might willingly pay a little more for locally made goods and ignore the prophets of neoclassical economics who consign us to isolation in our homes, forgotten by ourselves. Look out, here comes the man with the dangerous ties. Stop expressing your personality through your ties for Christ's sake. you'll get locked away. What a relief to find the mundane so rewarding."
And so, as described above, repetition, continuity and seeking refuge in the mundaneness of life are the key towards happiness. We delight ourselves from the little things that remind us who we are, that we are here and that we are all immensely, incredibly and inextricably important to each other.