by Brian Ng
When we’re required to start in a cage, some people panic. Some people start banging at the bars or keys. Brian starts with Kafka, and goes on from there.
I woke up and found myself inside a cage. Immediately I realized that the metal base of the cage was very different to the queen-size mattress I slept on at home. It was too small for me to stretch comfortably, and the murky floor irritated my – golden fur?
I had become a lion, inexplicably.
I explored my body in the cramped cage. I scratched my handsome, youthful mane. I stroked my ticklish tail. I licked my jagged teeth – strong but not enough, not to gnaw at iron bars. I sensed my limitless energy and ravenous hunger. I was starving not just for food, but for freedom. I should be darting through wide African plains…
I sighed in desperation. Deities of old legends had turned men into animals to teach strange morals. But why the transformation? And what is my moral? A lion, a symbol of bravery, royalty and virility. Am I here to show my faith, as Daniel did in darkness? Or to be Aslan, to search for disciples to join him on a holy crusade? But what is there to accomplish in a lonely prison?
I slept in angst.
How many days? Months? Years? I couldn’t tell. I heard the screeches of humbled creatures, but my tired eyes failed me. My fur dulled and shed. My teeth bled. My muscles atrophied.
I was rotting away. So were the memories of my previous life. I no longer remembered skies, faces, events. Was there much difference between my lives? Did the differences matter anymore?
In the cage, I lay in silent reflection, no longer moving, desiring or dreaming. Without willing it, my head slid to the floor as I heard the door click open.
All That Remains
by Christie Chiu
Christie and I have been friends since we were Smurf-sized (I lie, we were at least as tall as garbage cans). Asides from this unfortunate lapse in judgment, she’s purely amazing. So is her writing.
Rest your head child,
And close the nightmares.
Rest your head
And shut the weary eyes,
dead hollow orbs
Now plastered on a fantasy,
Reborn and thus no more.
Mourn, for the lost soul
Weep, for the lost love
But you alone know
Nothing will compare,
No one will fathom the depths.
Comforting gestures are lost to meaning,
all you need now is silent.
Rest your head child,
And pray to the Maker,
Chase the underworld away
Of mangled corpses on mocked altars,
Crumpled in fear.
And on that deathly throne
She sits, clothed in cruel white
A burning crown on a dead bride's veil,
Swept together by He
Who took her from you, led you by blood,
His blood
And she was reborn,
But not your mother
Rest your head child
And seek comfort in the lull of sleep.
For now, let the night take you,
The soft mattress cushion you.
Do not cry out in distress.
And grow faint of heart.
For now,
Rest your head child
And good night.
Event Horizon
by Elizabeth Cheung
I confess, this wasn’t exactly written for the Cognoscenti. But then, I am selfish- I rarely write for anything but myself.
It is very cold when there is nothing, and there is solely your own flame for warmth. You spend aeons like this, and if you knew how to, you would huddle. There is only an absence that you must learn is black, the colour black. That is all.
The spaces don’t quite exist between you and the others, there is sense of vague heat that does not touch you but instead plies its presence across your surface.
And that is all. Heat, fire, the dim sense of stars. Not contentment, as you will later learn, but simplicity. Then there is a moment, a long series of moments. Not sensations of time spliced with one another, but an outer movement that you had never known before. Some thing that spirals slowly across nothing and enters you and you realize that it is silver, and metal, and something you could not have known before. Hued red by your presence, it does not give at first then yields itself in a burst. Pellucid sweetness fills you from this shard of a strange race, with a form made of something you cannot wrap the shape of in comprehension.
The metal sinks into you, becomes one with you, and you become aware of a strange yearning for some thing you do not know. It is indefinable, and you sift the memories which are yours now, yours in a way nothing ever was. There was touch yes, the memory of holding a neck too weak to support yourself. You do not understand why that should give you pleasure, not when it also pains you, in the core of you which is a void. And strange, that you did not know you were a void until now.
And all the more you become aware of nothing, which is menacing in a way it was not until you began the forming of thought over flame. Gathering your sensations, your memories, you call out from the center of you across the distance that separates you from others. Vaguely you feel that by calling, perhaps they might return your fire. But there is no reply, no warmth, only an oppressive coldness. The stars do not speak, do not understand speech, only a brief aeterna of senses that become in them as objects pass and fade.
It is cold. There is the void and the cruel sensation of stars. Through your memories you find names, you find coldness equal to your own in a strange planet warmed by stranger stars. Cold metal rooms, with crystals set in walls. There are trees on a mountain, green and fed by something your fire will not encounter, and will not shrink from. The metal sank roots into you, you realize, and that is what you are grasping after as though you might find its source. And from those muttered people you take syllables, something not simply pressed into your being but made your own: Yisra.
And now that you know the measure of seconds, minutes, hours, millennia, the bleak expanse of time is stretched before like a wasteland. How many times do you stretch sensation to the nearest star, how many times your senses wheeled the orbit of dark eyed Mars, you know now with a certainty that is heavy to bear.
The core of you is weighed with memory, loneliness for touch. Still you search through memories for the curved silver that had entered you, half of a hollow hemisphere. You see how your people crawled from the mud and shaped it and worked the core of planets, and began to seek what lay in the void. And you would have told them there is nothing, nothing until they gave their secrets up so freely, but you do not know where they are.
They forge silver ships, curved like old beacons, buoys to ascend the void with. And you see the launching of strange silver craft, and in them you see a greater knowledge then you yet possess. An ache wells up in you that you can not fulfill.
There is one image of a spacecraft that rebounds off others, sharper and more bitter than the others. A spacecraft with small creatures and your people. It is sunk so deeply in your metal that the sensation almost seems external, and in the pain taught you that is hope you gather your heat and send it coiling outwards. And you see the spacecraft explode. Flame scours it clean in the clear blue heat, and the echoing warmth of metal gives you the memories of six people all ending, falling in white flame, hurled.
There is no escaping from yourself. How to remove the metal that is your core you do not know, do not want to know. Better to have this pain, this knowledge that your matter is made of destruction, than to know nothing once again. All that you might know is fire, and of your people that were never yours. No asking of simplicity. You have found there is no answer.
And there’s no escaping now, is there? You made your choice the moment you decided to learn.
Only the heat of your own flame for warmth to be comfort. Strangely, the void in your heart grows smaller with that thought. So that is what a children’s toy is like. No tensing, no hesitation. You call up your fire, and plunge it into the void within you. And the fire of you collapses inward.
Hunt
by Laura K. Ann
Every now and then, we hear the sound of the Wild Hunt. Sometimes, we read it.
To the rhythm of hoofbeats
Horns trumpet; hounds howl,
Chasing across fields.
Leap, run, flee for life;
The womb of the earth beckons -
Safety and refuge.
Darkness envelopes;
In the tunnels below ground
Not a sound is heard.
Only silence soothes
The frightened, rapid beating
Of a rabbit's heart.
ABIDING AMONGST
by Chloe Lam
Chloe has a maturity to her that I can only envy. She writes poetry, but her prose also possesses lyricality to it that I hope to feature soon.
Abiding amongst the mist,
The allures of the dark sky
The moon, silently, only very
Lightly opening itself to light.
She will diverge to every
Corner of the vast, unknown world.
Amidst my callowness
I was told:
But little does it know…
It holds the greatest mystery, where
They will admire from a
Peculiar planet, mantled and
Apart.
Observations on The Rome Statute
by Benjamin Allen
What can I say? Actually, he’s said it all. Go on, read. (I should add here that as he's a freelancer for SCMP, he's the only professional here)
Observations on the Rome statute
Ben- what can I say? Actually, he’s said it all. Go on, read.
When the Rome statute came into force in 2002, the world had much to celebrate. In the aftermath of a century which had witnessed carnage beyond previous imagination, the promise of an independent International Criminal Court capable of bringing perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice was a cause to be hopeful.
Long in the making, with its roots in the Nuremburg/Tokyo Trials and the uphill battle for the codification of human rights in international law, the Court was ultimately born out of collective shame. The burning churches of the Rwandan Genocide haunt us; the tragedy of Srebrenica scarred us; our failure to act condemned millions to their deaths. Perhaps the turn of the millennium marked a chance to start anew.
Ten years on, the question remains to be asked: has the Court succeeded? Happily, in many aspects it has been a great success. The very signing of the Rome Statute and its ratification in over a hundred countries marks a great commitment to international justice. The current Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has worked tirelessly and not hesitated to indict even sovereign heads of state. It has even been reported that the court’s indictment of Jean-Pierre Bemba, leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo, has led him to demobilize his child soldiers– showing the deterrent effect of universal jurisdiction.
For rebel leaders and autocrats, it is increasingly clear that they cannot keep lying, cannot keep killing and cannot keep trampling on the organic desire for democracy of their peoples. As an institution, the Court has left its mark.
However, is this mark truly indelible? China, Russia and India are not state parties to the Court. Though President Clinton initially supported the treaty out of shame over Rwanda, the Bush Administration formally ‘unsigned’ the Rome Statute in 2002. Without the support of the World’s most powerful nations, especially three permanent members of the Security Council, the court will struggle to function under its founding principle of complementarity.
Beyond that, without a police force or the ability to pressure states directly, the Court faces the practicality of bring indictees to trial. Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir is still at large. Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the court’s first indictee, still continues to maraud across Congo, Uganda and the Central African Republic.
In the face of such defiance, the road ahead for one of the World’s most promising institutions will undoubtedly be rocky. Yet despite the staunch opposition to the Court and the harshness of contemporary political reality, the answer is not to abolish it, as some states advocate, but instead streamline its role within the international community.
Firstly, self-styled as the moral compass of the world, the United States should drop its active condemnation of the Court. The actions of Senator John R. Bolton during the Bush Administration were irresponsible, and the fear of seeing statesmen like Henry Kissinger indicted is unfounded. Using blanket sovereignty cannot be an excuse, and the Obama Administration should recognize this and support the Court.
Secondly, state parties need to respect the Court’s jurisdiction. It was a disgrace to allow Omar Al-Bashir to walk free in Kenya, and an even bigger disgrace to then attempt to publicly defend such an action in the face of international scrutiny. Hopefully, with the Arab Spring and a democratic awakening in the Middle East, we will begin to see greater accountability and adherence to due process in Justice. These events are admittedly idealistic – yet not beyond the bounds of imagination.
The inception of the International Criminal Court itself represents a great achievement for humanity, and despite hard beginnings it holds great promise. It symbolizes a break with the old world order of immunity and Westphalian Sovereignty; it represents a return to the principles of natural law; it heralds the protection of fundamental human rights. For these reasons, I am proud to support the International Criminal Court, and dare to dream for the end of impunity.
Editor’s Note:
Ben makes, as always, not one but several excellent points. My thoughts on legality and the uniquely American, litigious perspective would be an issue (pun: already is) in itself. But I want to mention one more thing: If you’re over 18, go here.
Watch the film. Now think about you’ve done for the Congo. Or to.
~ Thank you.
By Logic-
Yvette Kong
Yvette asked to introduce herself, and gave me prose poetry instead. Not that I’m complaining, mind.
Scattered all around my footsteps- Your mind creates the world, many would say. But no, it stretches only as far as your limits of knowing. If appropriate, and if it’s not, I want. My interest lies in the construction of the different worlds people indulge themselves in. Some of you might begin to think that I come from alienated space. Please, save your imagination; I’m grounded by logic.
The Pretentious Haiku
by Zareen Chiba
Zareen has several loathsome qualities, such as being highly attractive, intelligent and witty. However she balances that with being a wonderful person, so the law is fair. To be exact, Murphy's Law.
Editor's Note: This was her spontaneous reply to the Cognoscenti's opening, and quite honestly this encapsulates the Cognoscenti spirit.
Enthusiasm!
My ego has burned long now
For acknowledgement.
Thank you all, and watch out for the next issue, coming in late November!
~ As always (with monocles, if not manacles),
The Pretentious Cognoscenti
