Rain

It is pouring as I write, almost as if someone is desperately trying to hit the rainfall quota before the end of the year. It has been pouring the whole of December since I’ve been back. So there is winter in Singapore after all. I never known the difference between seasons to be so drastic. Had I merely never noticed, or is global warming moving up a notch?

The rain seems to portend the passing of a year, a torrent of emotion no longer being held back. Yet it is also as a waterfall in some run-of-the-mill adventure story, a diaphanous veil concealing treasure beyond, the Ding an sich, the hidden reality of which I wish to speak but am unable to. That failure to describe reality is itself the reality which I must describe.

Words of a Romantic. But if the truth is indeed hidden in the rain, what should happen when it ceases? Does the truth surface, or is it forever lost with that fleeting precipitation? Either way, the search is impossible without the rain, much as the Kantian dove wishing for the air to disappear so it can experience flight without resistance will end up experiencing no flight at all. Perhaps it is this writer seeing in the rain an obstacle to writing which is truly himself.

Any truth within has not been announced by thunder. The nimble drops from the dark nimbus clouds crash loudly enough, strangely. They hurtle to the ground, either couriers rushing to deliver their messages, or bandits seeking to pry secrets from the earth, or even revellers gathering on New Year’s Eve.

So the patter of raindrops transfers their kinetic energy into my fingertips, and the water transmutes itself into the letters flowing across the screen. Transience has been captured seemingly, some vestige of universality salvaged from the particularity of this rain, becoming once more particular in the words that you read.

If there is something to be discerned, it is not to be discerned in the rain.