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2002-04-10 - 7:07 a.m. An exercise in perception; I sat with Pierre at the coffeeshop at the defunct Republic theatre (why are there no more new cinemas with names like that—Republic, Empress, Majestic, and those other names—Beauty World, Gay World, Great World…), and asked him what he thought of me. It was a loaded question, perhaps demanding tact from the other, but the way I asked it was naively—and hence it wasn’t that I wanted anything less than total honesty, but that anything more than total honesty would be something I would be unable to understand… And I recorded it in my notebook, the one with faux zebra-skin, and this was what I had written: ‘Deconstructing Alfian’ 1) What is the barrier to knowing him? The reiterated picture of him as the writer, as opposed to the person. 2) What is the ‘writer’? If one encounters his writing before meeting him, then there are these assumptions one brings into the picture. 3) What is the problem with the ‘writer’? He writes first, before he lives. (Instead of living first, then writing) 4) So is the hope for me in making friends who are illiterate? … Four months later I look back at this and wonder how much of it is true. Pierre is an honest friend, he was trying to separate the person from the persona as if they are two leaves of a window, trying to make out that space in between, which is also the space beyond. But I thought I’d add my own belated addendum to that one incident during late-night supper in Marine Parade… ‘A Deconstructed Alfian Replies’ 5) An encounter with my writing is an encounter with the person. Between the words are my eyes, like those of the hidden orphan peeping from the spaces between the floorboards. 6) I don’t write first before I live. I live once when I am in the process of writing. The final full stop in the text is when I die, and then I live again, sometimes grudgingly allowing time and space to re-enter my house, having locked them out while I was indulging in that other life. 7) There are times when I live first before I write. Sometimes there is a distinct lag between the act of living and the act of writing, like, for example, four months. The evidence is above. 8) My best friends are not those who have read all I have written. They are those in which all my future books are buried. A poem by Octavio Paz: Poet's Epitaph He tried to sing, singing not to remember his true life of lies and to remember his lying life of truths.
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