Category: Justin Loke
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“It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of…
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The word caesuras comes from the Latin caesura, which means “a cutting” or “a break.” It is built from the verb caedere, meaning to cut, to strike, even to kill. The term Caesarean section is commonly believed to come from the birth of Julius Caesar, but this is almost certainly a legend. The real origin…
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I often see roadkill on the streets of Singapore, small animals, mostly birds, often pigeons or Javan myna. They’re not just struck dead, but slowly obliterated by the endless stream of cars, until all that remains is a dark, indistinct smear on the asphalt. As a child, I was once told there’s a superstition about…
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Whenever we speak about a person or a thing, we unknowingly perform two moves. First, we name it (“Katie,” “this person here”), which singles it out. Second, we say something about it (“she is kind,” “she is tall”), which assumes that there is already a stable “someone” underneath our words. Aristotle Aristotle noticed this and…
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to ti ēn einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) Every person carries within them a quiet shape, a way their life has carved them into who they are. It is not just the fact that they exist, but the particular texture of their existence: the small decisions, the losses survived, the habits formed, the joys that…
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You were very sick during that year. Bedridden in the hospital, unable to walk, you lay staring at the black TV screen in the room. The TV was off. The flat screen, slightly tilted, on the wall like a painting not properly hung. The book you had with you contained an essay titled Discovery of…
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Spinach as Pharmakon At first glance, Popeye the Sailor seems harmless: a comic celebration of spinach, a cartoon moral about the virtues of healthy eating. Yet beneath its slapstick repetitions lies a darker structure. Popeye is not simply nourished by spinach; he is dependent on it. He cannot triumph without the can. Read allegorically, Popeye…
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At times, reading Walter Benjamin, or reading about him, brings me back to that afternoon when she was cooking in the kitchen. The copy I had was from the school library. I remember a renowned local art historian, during some gathering, dismissively calling the library collection “wretched,” unaware, perhaps, that John had asked the library…
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Not all mirrors are made of glass. But under certain lighting conditions, glass becomes a mirror. I am not thinking of convex or concave surfaces, of a distorted reflection on a spoon, a glass half-filled with water, or the sun glinting off the hood of a car, but only of flat panes that at night,…
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La Arena by Justin Loke Ng Sua Ping, a Teochew Singaporean, grew up in the Robertson Quay area, also known as Au Pa Yoh, or Chwee Long Lai. He didn’t complete secondary school and was orphaned at eighteen. As a child, he had once unwittingly warned a young British soldier at Bugis Street night market…
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