the text and images below are posted from beijing, berlin, buenos aires, hong kong, los angeles, new york, sado island, shanghai, tokyo and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.
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treatise on the university of disaster

I had no idea what he was talking about, really. Reverberations pass away easily, behind the ears, at pressure points, when cooking. Roles are performed in adequate fashion, resulting in countering feelings of inadequacy, words flow, nothing is communicated. The treatise is about performance, perhaps. Insinuation of a guise, this is not real, whichever how you really feel. No, really. Keeping it real.

Had no idea what i was talking about really. Sometimes the emotions would arise, and one would find oneself unable to act appropriately, a subjective propriety, a nicety. Trying not to look too hard at his pimples. The palimpsest of his pimples, because even thirty-somethings get them, oh yes, renewal, we can feel like teenagers again and again and over again.

Your postmaturity, maybe. Treatises that we haven’t written yet, half-thoughts, names dropped, another drifting off on the bus again. No, there. When the girl with the ponytail steps on my foot in the bus, I notice her, her captivated audience of fellow passengers, a spectacle in action. She is playing paper-rock-scissors with a boy shorter than her, perhaps that is what it makes it more obvious that he is cheating the game, as his eyes steal glances upwards on every count, towards her poised hand, ready to draw. If he is quick he can change his draw at the last moment, just after he’s seen her paper or rock or scissor coming down like an absurd call of judgement. His is fickle and cunning at the same time. Paper wraps around rock. But each time the breath before the draw is prolonged just a bit longer; she knows his game. He knows she knows his game. And the game shifts a little bit, bus ride bumpy, to a different battle of suspense: who will cheat on the other first. the classic grid of one to another strategy, don’t call it war, it’s just the way things are. remember that lecture that we went to where you didn’t understand? Punnett for non-pundits, I’m on the bus and I could observe this moment for hours. fault or fancy? their fists are suspended in mid-air, holding on a bit longer than forever. this is a treatise on the university of disaster.

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Zürich night

Photo courtesy of Nic Shepherd

Some 15 minutes after having been abandoned at the Perla Mode by an American living in Zürich, I found him again at another opening at a small exhibition space called Les Complices. He made some comment about how I was typically Canadian because of the desire I expressed (which admittedly had structured my last 5 years) to keep going out rather than back to North America. I had not assigned value to my statement, and in my view it could indeed be taken as a lack of control and capriciousness. The space, which had a DJ playing, was a queer art space. I was not sure if my jocular, drunk brotherness was appreciated, and I was in the mood to joke. Out front one of the drunk women, who turned out to be a Canadian from Montreal, tried to convince her acquaintances to go out to a non-gay place to dance. She appeared to be quite drunk, and unless I was mistaken, the other two were not very fond of her. She had pimples. The other two returned to their friends inside and I was left, so she asked me and I thought, why not, I’d like to go dancing. We walked arm in arm down the street to a place right on Langstrasse. She joked with the bouncer who tried to remain stern, they were obviously familiar with each other, and it made me feel that this was a small town. Inside it was hip hop night, and various large men rocked back and forth in the red velvet surroundings. She knew someone (although they claimed they hadn’t known each other before) and they began talking. She asked me to buy her a drink, but I really had no money on me. This other girl seemed to be looking for someone to go home with. They asked me if I wanted to fuck, said that it was what everyone in the room wants. I joked that I was a virgin and the girl believed me, appeared to take pity on me, which made me uncomfortable – when I retracted the statement she asked me what kind of lover I was. I motioned to some of the large men standing near the turntables “maybe they want to fuck.” She considered this and went to see about it. When the lesbian’s back was also turned I used the opportunity to slip out the front door with my backpack on. I walked home along the vacant street car lines. I kept thinking of the girl’s sad expression when she said she came to the bar quite regularly, but no one had interest in fucking her. It made me kind of sad too.

[courtesy of Michael Eddy, October 2009]

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もう一つの夏の俳句 | another summer haiku | 夏天的俳句诗

或许、

夏天时有风、
有时清凉有时痛
一想它就疯

2006年日文俳句诗的变奏曲 by 高灵 Ling and 逗号 Comma。上海2008年7月

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sous les pavés, la plage

BEFORE AND DURING AND AFTER: Three days’ thought on media culture and artificial life

…as responsible human beings, we forget (Ha, seduction!). Were we unable to, every horror and every pain experienced as the newly born would retain itself, excruciating, just as every moment of laughter and joy, but we would never recover. The mirrors of Lacan are as inevitably linked to artificial life as self and world. And forgetfulness is not so much saying no as being able to say yes again. Are you ready to rule the world?

—-From a small text written, weaving writing experiment, flow. June 2008, Saas-Fee. Read the full essay [here]. Apologies for lack of page numbers for notes/references, please write if you need more.

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for severality, on fragility 1

To sustain fragility, a stamp on the box or the curiosity of half-opened contents. She says it is a trauma, beyond or prior to event, infliction in mere seconds or unconscious years, is p(h)ys(ch)ical.

He shudders in late afternoon half-sun. Sometimes, somewhere else and longing to be repeated, never repeated, she recoils, not horror. Those prickling sparks of the nerves they call falling asleep, …i’m exhausted.

Fragility means that you might find yourself not on the subjective level (coming, pre-, before you), we are partial to (one another) and we are partial (a many subjectivities). The pieces lay strewn and ambitious! What is already fragmented can beg a prism-like movement, sometimes slight twisting of the wrist to open a new light, from Levinas’ very first illumination (but in the refusal of darkness).

Once we saw three at once, a tunnel lining an enormous thundering sky, and we drove through them all.

—-not a means to an object, we pass through what passes through us. Fragility, the broken glass after the break, under but begging the open, makes transparent without needing to be seen. But it is not concealment as such (those chatting at the bar simply do not notice), nor a state to induce fascination (stillness, displacing life) so much as laying bare, not bare or just being there, in the middle of an ongoing process. The prolongation of fragility is not a state of being, but may find itself in the invisible inconsistencies of ritual, the anticipation or the suspension of an event. Its fascinance can never be an isolated moment, for it can only exist in relation to the other, as cause or affect or the relinquishing notion of wanting to be part of all of you. That longing, whether in pain or love, is more real that real itself, for it is the realm of the possible-not-yet.

Fucking phantasy! I owe you one.

1 Martin Hielscher, Hiroaki Kanai, Sean Smith, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Pierre Huyghe, Bracha Ettinger

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re:

Barthes references the “obtuse meaning” as beyond signification, where it is neither informational nor symbolic. There is no proper structure; it is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming or identifying. “If the obtuse meaning cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not copy anything—-how do you describe something that doesn’t represent anything?” (from notes, seminar of Hubertus von Amelunxen, Saas-Fee June 2008)

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re: re:presentation

thoughts on the subject of clarity, or, in support of the seductive drones ///

If that longing could be drawn out, literally, it could have taken this form, what would have attempted a seduction in the most subtle and powerless way, or, would it be possible to ask you to stay. These are not questions so much as awkward statements, one would like the fluent strength of rationality, pretty scripts to address the subject, but so much said, so much would dull the edges of the discourse as much as anything. To abstain from that articulation may be a political statement, or even an uncertainty, but it should be possible to make exactly that wavering attempt, without course to addressing one’s audience as potential convert, without the determinacy of the commodified idea.

We have lost the ability to simply search openly, our lateral glides across hyperspace become hierarchies of large type and the diversities of ‘state life’ mistaken for richness. But please do not misunderstand (…) …this is not a call for a return to authenticity or something more primal than the now. As such would be merely another flight. But to embrace all that we have not resolved, as seeking beings—-because we have not caught up to our own embodiment, urbanity, presence, or forces of habit—-can, with relief, never be clear. If it were, would we have conquered our own existences, overly latent, and been made subjects of our own subjectivity? Is this crass, or is it a call to vitalism? Would the critics of Coleridge sneer and we be comfortingly dismissed back to the ‘little’ motions of everyday life? Ha! Seduction.

Perhaps, but it is an embedded one. Everyday, everyday, everyday. The question is in the answer is in the question.

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notes on love and writing, turning thirty again, obachans grin

To write is to permit others to conclude one’s own discourse, and writing is only a proposition whose answer one never knows. One writes in order to be loved, one is read without being able to be loved, it is doubtless this distance which constitutes the writer. (Roland Barthes)

::writing about writing, between shanghai and beijing, 2 December

today i become a writer. written self reading a purple journal like being in this airplane, oh i fucked up fucked up so many times, “it’s just that this year has been so full of small, stupid, non-descript disasters, not the big ones that could at least be identified as crisis.” sometimes in reading their words i describe my own surroundings, the small spaces around the page being written as we read others: (please fall in love with me). He is nonchalant about loose trivia on japanese aesthetics like mentioning the names of people he knows.

“The proximity of two differing individuals can become too intense.” (Arnold Barkus)

They are all your friends. And the more old friends that keep popping up in magazines, oh, we must be doing okay. And all the ones that don’t, that come up instead in cafés, in the airplane a couple rows ahead, on someone’s facebook friend list or just in my memory, well… we’re all sorry it turned out this way, we haven’t turned out at all, or against all, or we’re just turning…

so many things happened this year, i lose sight of the things that matter most.

but i’ll love you through the pages of a matte-papered magazine, and maybe that’s enough for today.

“30”, Binna Choi, from The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories, ed. Melissa Lim and Heman Chong:

Perhaps this sudden consciousness of my turning thirty has become entangled with my untamed anxiety, which stems from my own difficulty in being myself when with others. In other words, what mattered, bothered and concerned me can be summed up as my “relationality” with her, him, another me, different me, disappearing me or whatever, or the air, time, space or something. With her leaving and being. With him next to me or with him annoying me. With the density or stuffiness of air. With speed. With intensity…

I am writing about turning thirty, but in doing so, I could be seeking to deny or erase it. This piece is written in the present, about a somewhat unknown future that we are in the process of progressing towards. I hope that the significance of turning thirty will surface later on. You know, I will never be thirty – I will only be two thousand, two hundred and and seven years old next year, I bet.

Hence “writing about turning thirty” is a means of pulling myself out of the preconceived position one has as part of one’s culture or society. It is also a way for me to create an interstice for myself without deliberate avoidance of particular cultural or temporal frameworks. I am trying to prevent these aspects from governing me or my being with “others” within and outside of these frames. I want to take responsibility for my life or lives of others in mine, and ultimately grin — rather than laugh with sound — in the face of my struggles, strengths, delights – like that mad girl on a bus who glared at me as I stared back at her years ago.

Before I can reach this state that allows me to “grin”, let me pose a fundamental question: why do I write? I’d asked this same question quite a few times before, and I know that I have a problem with delving into it. Actually I even doubt that I had ever “written” in the most idealistic sense of that word. I reckon my fantasy is that writing for me is an opportunity to communicate in silence, to compose and liberate what is a part of me, be it my fascination, wonder, despair, concern, joy, beliefs, thoughts and so on — without being dogmatic. I want to believe that I make friends and love through writing.

writing having been written, between beijing and tokyo and los angeles and dallas/fort worth, 22 december

today, before leaving Beijing, it was written: “yes!”

There is no fear in that. No fear, no fear. Its beauty is impressed upon my skin as much as it distances. it was like looking again into the past. Every new realisation is also recognition of all that past in which you did not know it before! Linda didn’t get it at the time. Now she’s married and has dogs, surely she knows something we do not?

It was brought up again over dinner that that desire to cut off was as much the fear of being disconnected from. He cannot understand the difference between the cup there, or here, or there… And I thought we bought this salad. Well, you certainly didn’t buy me. But it’s the cup and the salad and the me and the you, and if we acknowledge no distinctions between any or all, how far can we go in attempt of love? Should we be left formless? Where would we go, and how would we know who we are anymore?

He reminds her that they are all connected. Of course, all these things are written into the body. Past is future is present, so just watch. I watch what i do not see: the big-eyed girl crying in secret, the small-eyed girl crying all day. I wish you could see more so that i wouldn’t have to explain anymore.

“Giorgio Agamben claims that the most important political goal is to find new ways to make the human body inoperative, in the sense that poetry makes language inoperative, to find new uses for the human body.” Would you want that I gave myself completely to you? Would you want that i agreed with everything you said, that everything that you wanted was what i wanted, too? I keep trying to think with those words, read from a monk when I was in Japan: “utmost reverence”. I try to say “yes!” too. But it’s not what I want. So please stop telling me everything you know about me. Because you don’t. And you won’t so long as your eyes stay wanting.

You are watching. I am watching, too. We just don’t always see the same thing.

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