Activism is increasingly instrumental, meaning it’s a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. This makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which renders hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we’re trying to leave behind.
— Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times
it awoke me from sleep, the thought. A correction. something that clarified the feeling of not wanting to forgive, or not being able to. it’s trite, but three had always been my breaking point in this series of incursions, especially in those cases when there has been a latitude of attempted understanding and reasoning in between. the recipient of the gaslight, on the other hand does not calculate. how much is enough? the arbitrariness of numbers is probably less reasonable than the process of enduring or the tenacity of tolerating or the act of forgiving. actually on a certain level, it would be unreasonable——no?——to say to a friendship, to love, that i do not accept this anymore. right? W says there is no reason to 絕交 and we need time to learn and understand one another. of course. but what if i say simply that i am unable to continue like this? i do not like to count, but something keeps ticking. was it that which woke me from sleep?
perhaps it was the sudden clarity of watching an awkward transpiring of a series of very reasonable utterances of ‘not quite loyal’ words. the crispy field recordings of an anthropocene, brown noise wilderness that had kept me unconscious before came back again through the reverse journey from sleep into a dream-like scenario. i am in the post-apocalyptic game which we had romanced together last summer. so i am alone, but reflecting upon relationships that are perhaps no longer possible, and there is something forlorn and undone about this, though that’s what apocalypse is really. it’s drizzling and murky here all the time, here and there, we woke into dream and reality is simply a matter of perspective. it’s exactly that we argued about this, a simple difference of experience about something that happened in the past. you brought it up because you were hurt and disappointed, but what is meant by ‘not quite loyal’ is that hurt is prickly and dishonest if it only cowers behind rage. it’s reasonable, yes, like when i reason with myself that forgiveness is a higher ground. i’ve still never gotten there, still on game one（放下，不是放棄，而不是失去）, too short of an attention span for mantras.
how does she keep forgiving? it’s a questionably positive character trait these times around, a puzzle to play on both sides, like when S describes M’s bad quality of not being able to see anything negative of anyone else. I thought when she said it, oh, how strange that is! What’s so wrong with roses? But anyway, I am not M nor your ex-girlfriend, not so forgiving and not so resilient, maybe not so tolerant, not so enduring. i don’t want to calculate, but don’t know how to bear the unfair exchange of a wound for a blow, even if understand how I may be implicated in its opening. I am sorry, even, that I said something awkward and ambivalent when we played the game that time, but wasn’t it obvious that we were in the grey and murky chapter where awkward and ambivalent things are uttered? Is being sad and disappointed a violence already inflicted, with reasonably violent returns? That is the ambivalence of saying stupid things that you realise are stupid in the midst of voicing them, but there they are, your mouth is open, stupidity lays before you just as the person in front of you, the one who receives it while listening with an unwittingly ever so slightly peaked (piqued?) eyebrow. The person in front of you doesn’t say anything in this moment, of course——that’s what ambivalence does; it delays time in the staccato of its complexly unfurling hesitations, though the simultaneous folding in and folding over of affect leads to other arhythmic utterances for which connections are astray and hence may also be categorised as stupid. ‘retarded’ is a politically incorrect term these days, but it is exactly about the mismeasure of time rather than being wrong or right per se. Ambivalence is fair. Its slowness is an emphasis upon space rather than its surrounding points and prickles.
justice requires calculation. but i’m no heroine, and it’s always a bit more complicated than that.
Posted by 丫 | reply »it was our dream come true
我們的發達資本主義 our advanced capitalism #20
surplus Japanese plastic bags circulating in China
she says the ‘E’ possibly stands for “economy”
“I use also my bag.”
icarus
“Did I really speak? Have I ever really spoken?”
Posted by 丫 | reply »a koan for the distant neighbor near 雍和宫, for you to give? 我都无奈了 (a gossip column)
the story goes like this: Master Nansen notices that all of the monks in the temple have been playing with a kitten they have discovered, but this small kitten becomes a source of contention between different sides of the temple, and the monks of the East Hall and West Hall begin to quarrel. Nansen takes the kitten and says to them, unless anyone can give a good reason why i should not kill this cat then i will have to do so. No one is able to voice a reason to save the kitten’s life, and the master subsequently beheads it. Later, when Joshu returns to the temple from an errand, the priest says to him it was such a pity he had not been there earlier, that he might have been able to save the kitten’s life. Upon hearing the story, Joshu takes his shoes off and places them on his head.
“a jouissance and trauma event.” rediscovering wikipedia (she had not been to the art fair, though always knew who was sleeping with whom), an answer, an answer, thinking as praxis. three meals a day, always a vegetarian option. (he’ll be moving to new york soon, G train commute) new word-constructs in the evening make up for things vaguely said, (the athletic body can’t touch his toes, thinking about serenity, sunburned amidst snow) an evening affronting thoughts, but 如果这样呢？ can cultural translation do what you do (a builder bounds up the mountain, jeans torn at the inseams), and would it be offensive——no competitive——his blind light, the other’s parrot, what you didn’t say may very well have been an ideology, too (he smiles so sweetly, nodding, Vertigo). but it moved me, it moved me, almost to toes but not quite yet, knees in pain, and it occurred that simone may have found it a warm-up kind of activity (pick another person in the room, and without them knowing it, follow them, follow them until the signal then try to grab at any cost), but physicality on time-delay is an encounter event, too. though we’re not yet feminist, nor poiesistic, and matrixial, hmmm… if it were so idiosyncratic and marginal, will it still exist in the end? (she said one gets used to the sight of dead bodies, and her eyes turned green) still have not seen Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau but have been thinking about it for years. the years don’t cut it, oh thirty, counting down, cut me out, 放新学的字在桌子上, words with slashes in between (she said he was like a New York painter in the 50s, but he prefers New Brunswick), what works like that , no more fixing up, please, “the possibility with a project is just to try.”
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