Carpe Diem or Memento Mori

________

1. Do you dream in colour or in black and white?

2. What if you don’t remember your first date?

3. How old were you in your earliest memory? What if the age you were and the ages your parents are now don’t add up?

4. If memory is the chest of photographs then what happens when it fails?

5.What is the persistence of time? Is it in its desire to erode a realm that was never there or to create the illusion of its passing?

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Of Farand “the Bean” Chen

(At the bus-stop outside Raffles Hotel after chasing a pair of AMGC who were too fast. Farand reaches over to Denise’s Norton.)

Denise: What?! What you want?

Bean: I want to read.

Denise: Are you sure?!

Bean: I will try.

(Denise hands Norton over hesitantly.)

Bean: Okay. Which one is easy to read?

Denise: Can I show you the one that I like?

(Flips to Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night without waiting for the answer that was already overdue. The Bean reads (?).)

Bean: I don’t understand.

Denise: Okay. Read this one. Very sad. I cry. Short poem.

(Flips to Anthem of Doomed Youth. Bean reads, nods and says things after.)

Denise: Oh! Oh! There’s one that I really, really like. From the same poet, about World War I also. Dulce et Decorum Est.

Bean: (triumphantly) Dolce and Gabbana!

Denise: WHAT?!

Bean: I couldn’t think of anything else to say. That was the best I could come up with.

Note on dramatis personae Bean – OCS Charlie Wing Best, Vice-Chair for Social Night, Future student at QUT, Ngee Ann Polytechnic Mass Communication Graduate holding a diploma with merit and Gold CCA certificate, ex-OBS President, person whose photos are in a banner outside OBS at East Coast...

It’s very sad the Bean will not be here for housewarming on the 23^rd. Now we have to pay for a jester.

________

Of Laughter, Love and The Winter’s Tale

Love is a special frame of mind that straddles the thin line of pain and pleasure, concern and paranoia, reason and irrationality, renewal and death. We see that a tragedy must first happen or be embedded in our minds, in the speeches and declarations of love before we can truly love in laughter and believe the very much impossible. If we open our minds to wondrous possibilities and lose ourselves in the pleasure of that madness, as we have been urged, we will see that the enduring theme is not the possibility of the miracle but that love, with its limits, can transcend and transform tragedy to comedy, funeral to wedding and stone to flesh.