Woke up with the spirit of contradiction depressingly strong in me this morning. The sun is shining outside, sparkling on the water, laughing at this indignant little Malaysian in her foreign, all-expenses paid studio, as she tries to soothe and tame that useless frustration and turn it into something useful.
The immediate source of my agitation is visual, as it so often is. Underneath probably gurgles something much more pathetic, like mild sexual frustration. But the immediate source, the immediate itch, is a picture of Malaysia's first man in space. There he hangs in his cockpit, a Jalur Gemilang on himself, a Jalur Gemilang hanging in the background, grinning like an idiot - the whole scene is an obscene insult to the great ineffability of the cosmos itself; the very last frontier not conquered by our tacky, shallow, pathetic Malaysia Boleh LIE is now reduced to another feather our cap. And henceforth whenever I (and later my and your children) think of space, it will be with less humility for our insignificance in the universe, and worse, far worse, is that we will be less curious about looking up. The sky has always been the one place I look to for the source of all magic and mystery, no matter what is happening on the ground. Putrajaya, the billboards, the Visit Malaysia 2007 ads - they have all been visual assaults. Now the vision of this spaceman, this space mascot, has invaded my sacred place of wonder. I, who floated on air for days after seeing an image of the sun through a telescope, laugh and cry at the man in space who performed his daily prayers facing earth or the Kiblat, who spinned a top and tossed "batu seremban' (five-stone game), who painted a batik motif and made a teh tarik.
WHAT A FUCKING WASTE.
