Across space

(Extracts from The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun.
It lies in Heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge ….

…..From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove
Within the gulf to pierce
Its path; and now she spoke as when
The stars sang in their spheres.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather…..



The light thrilled towards her, fill'd
With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed, and she smil'd.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)

I thought of this poem as I watched the movie Thor today. Only it was not a damsel watching for her lover on earth from the parapet of Heaven, but the hammer wielding Thor standing at the edge of the destroyed Bifrost Bridge, the only connection of the people of Asgard to other worlds. As Thor looks into the abyss below, he asks Heimdall, the bridge’s gatekeeper who can see all and hear all, that what is Jane (the woman Thor falls in love with during his exile on Earth) doing. Heimdall says she is looking for you.

Spare me the trash!

For the last one hour I have been tearing address tags off the numerous spam mails we receive in the post every week. Promotional discounts for new start-ups, festive offers, reminder mails from magazines whose subscriptions are about to end, the trash is endless. This is when the pamphlets in Cantonese are discarded as soon as they are fished out of the mailbox. Most of it is unwanted. When I signed a one-year subscription for a magazine, I never expected to be bombarded weekly with subscription offers for one of the local English dailies. And it was not just a sheet of paper stating the deal. The spoilt-for-choice consumers we Hongkongers have become, an application form is usually included in any such promotional offer. A magazine that my husband never subscribed to has been sending him subscription offers with his name already printed on the form. I guess since a lot of magazines are marketed by the same company, when you sign in for one, you end up automatically giving the go ahead to be bombard with offers you never asked for. It is all about being spoon fed the want rather than having the want.

Lot of promotional pamphlets are sent en masse to every home in a block. But what the hell! I never asked for it. I appreciate the efforts companies make to let me know how they could help me lighten my bank account but they never asked me for my permission to flood my mailbox. My home address is no more a piece of information I choose to hand out to whom I want. Just because I fail to read the caveat hidden in the small font of the terms and conditions on any form I grace with my signatures, does not mean my privacy can be invaded.

Now that I have wasted almost an hour peeling off my address from envelopes and another one cribbing about it, I have decided to find out if there is anything I can do about it. Spam mail is not like e-mail spam that you can get rid of with a click. It takes many trees, even the specially farmed ones to produce all that trash mail. None of us want them. The flyers distributed on pavements and walk over bridges are binned as soon as they are handed out. Then why give them out? Ok, the marketing sense of it fails to enlighten me at the moment. And maybe they are a kind of marketing tool that cannot be dispensed with, especially by small companies. But part of it can be done away with right?

Most people in Hong Kong use the internet and have an email-id. A lot of bulky promotional that come in the mail could be sent via email. I like the idea of companies setting up stalls just outside MTR stations. When you are walking out or in you immediately notice the stalls. That is how a lot of us sign our newspapers and magazine combo subscriptions. Another novel advertising idea that I regularly see in Hong Kong is of people standing at the side of pavements with huge placards advertising a product. I am sure there are more of such interesting ways to advertise. We just need to find them.