i flew again on your birthday. that’s the excuse anyhow, for these weeks of greetingless-ness. but noticing that this makes for too many times of beginning with ‘sorry’ when the greeting finally comes, i don’t want to say sorry yet again——know i’ve already sucked the meaning of words dry these last years. too much has already been said, or if i did say it, something always warps and buckles along the way. bristles bend. it never feels right, and i detest this rightness. words overlap and cancel one another like low-res animations playing endlessly in an empty, unlit room.
actually it is now the third year in a row to be on an airplane on your birthday, perhaps the mark of a ritual. to be in air as excuse, to be full of air as metaphor, to be on flight mode as break of communication. to catch so much of your own breath there is no longer space for words. being in an airplane is kind of like that, anyhow, the quiet of disquiet, white noise turns pink turns brown, ears turn inwards.
perhaps rituals serve the same purpose: affirmations of meaning that do not really require words. small gestures repeated at certain intervals of time create affective knowledge, like knowing the amount of time before the sun’s blessings make Alÿsian-sized valleys of industrial blocks of ice. the valley of all that i could have said but did not spilled over the sides of the building, he sent American Greetings e-cards once a year, there was a click over a caress. she would rather say nothing at all than let it be said cheaply.
a no-rhythm rhythm. that’s the ritual. flight mode white-pink-brown noise, repetition, air-pressurised tinnitus, the rituals of getting older. i miss you sometimes and that is all. there is not much more efficacious beyond that. i really hope that you are happy, that your body fills with good air and songs of peace. the fact that i can no longer tell otherwise is perhaps the sign that there was no more space for me to know——air time——like the sound of a stranger’s breathing next to you on a long distance journey. it feels close because everything around is passing darkness, and you’re too timid to ask any more questions because you were once cursed for it. and because the best regard answers in words never bring you anywhere.
better to take a flight instead.
happy birthday and a new year, f
Posted by 丫 | more »
「尋找問候」，第五章（wish you were here no. 5）
the first page of Resident, or Resident Evil, or This Minor Contextualisation of a Minor Temporality Known as Publishing on the Run, self-published 2022 (the copy for boat is the only time a delivery has completely failed)
dear h.,
the first disclaimer is that this letter is possibly not to only be read by you. i can imagine you might find some offense to that, but i realised like some strange twitch in me, there is something making me unable to face up to certain individuals on the ‘should reply to’ list, kind of like being less able to look at people in the eyes. and if i could only make this happen through finding a channel through a more general, faceless you to you, then it may only be this for the time being. looking aside from your eyes, there is a thing next to the thing. but it must be next to you.
i hope you may not be too offended and can find a way to understand this possibly strange manner of behaviour, perhaps a bit of a narcissistic reverse to the original request to hear more about you. i think most of what i saw and wrote before were also self-projections, which despite their reassurances makes me feel worse somehow, like not being able to look a you in the eye. that is why i said i will try to ‘face’, another way.
i ran into our mutual acquaintance Y last weekend and——in the same vocal paragraph of bemoaning the fact that people don’t read anymore——she was adamantly encouraging about continuing to write. so i try to readdress.
the last message you wrote was that _Friends are important. Especially nice if one doesn’t need to socialize to have them_ And it has almost come to this stage in life where one can say exactly that, like wise (and funny) C. noted so so long ago about knowing a good relationship when you can sit together in the same room together and feel comfortable not speaking to one another. more recently, W. discovered a version of it in the form of a named therapy called ‘body doubling‘, which is a less romantic, more production-oriented way of thinking about being together in a world that is absolutely not ‘together with it’. That goes back to the difficulties of being sad-core in a success-driven society, though one may also argue that success-driving is exactly what makes the fissures with sadness ever irreconcilable.
so go back to rhythm. 4/4 time is simply 4/4 time, but one can be-come another, there must be infinite transitions from the one to the other, right? Is this a silly metaphor? What makes you laugh these days, if you are still thinking about the point of humour? I actually really love your laugh. It’s more like a giggle or a chuckle, because you are generally a quiet person, and that is endearing coming from a man, if i can say that. An array of subtleties there, but maybe (another projection here) that combination of cynicism with humour is where our rapport found its place. i think i would define absurdity in such a way, but hope we can find some sort of specificity here that extends it beyond the nationalised version of which you spoke? Or maybe you’re right, as we are mostly so well trained now as ‘internet Americans’. That is the horrible contemporary universalism of language and humour buttressed by technology. Do you remember the very bad joke about Elaine and Coke that you shared with me when we first began talking more, from the ad campaign that was all over the city at the time? Something like that.
Another thought. That you can continue with the small joy you take from the live shows. Small joys is the same thought as rhythm, i think. So how to maintain the rhythm in which you can keep returning to that? Because of course it is so hard to see what small joy is in the midst of a dark refrain, or in the outburst of anger. I try my best not to react these days. Writing to you in this way is perhaps the same gesture of self-reflection while feeling terrible. So yes, I don’t know how to think too much about Kassel because it bore, in some ways, that feeling of rift. The core and the face alienated from one another in this overdramatisation of camaraderie that I wanted to partake in, but could only flitter about numbly because most of the things that were causing internal distress had nothing to do with the context at hand. Looking back now, perhaps I could have made better links between the core space and the extension of limbs. I don’t know how that would have been possible. I tried the direct confession to the best of my ability. I apologised. And still, I lost a friend. Too many accumulations of ‘created absence’ these years. That echo of emptiness is probably what rings this tinnitus.
About you at that time, I only felt that you were eager for having a real dialogue, which I would have wanted to do but can never do in those social situations because I want to try to take care of everyone——a mise en scène——only to end up failing mostly myself, of course. I didn’t feel anything destructive on your part, only that you were unable to read this from me and the situation, leading to your feeling of disappointment? what did you feel was destructive? were you upset?
i think you know yourself well enough to make choices that work fine for you given circumstances, but perhaps it is also about learning to rely more upon what we don’t know about ourselves, or about others… I wonder if Brasil was able to do that for you? You didn’t say too much about it. Someone said to me once that when he was young, he used to think that he was right, that it was the whole fucking world that had gotten it all wrong. But the older he became, things turned, and maybe it was that the rest of the world had it right, and he was the one who couldn’t figure it out. Years later, a young friend said with a grin to me that he hopes to keep finding himself wrong, because it’s when he feels that he’s more ‘right’ than everyone else that he’ll know he’s gotten too old. are you an old man yet, dear h?
Shall we meet (online) soon? Do you have non-socialising, body-doubling friends where you are now? Is it important for you to bring bodies and friend(s) and ideas and trust together into one room, and how do you go about doing that?
from another city,
e[UTF-8]
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sometimes the fires cannot be fought,
in which case, you can also e-mail me at ho【愛特】iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter【點】net.
何穎雅 now in new territories.
without cringing 2022 screenshots of january and june
小船 Boat
With the exception of one fateful date, the four other exercises that I designed for Visual Diary Archive were each put together with a specific person in mind. I don’t speak to any of them so often anymore, and with distances, it sometimes becomes difficult to know where and how to begin again. Words don’t always bridge gaps, and perhaps neither do images, but if a series of exercises incite certain actions, I wonder what new thoughts, imaginations or understandings may be filled in the spaces between us.
The other quandary or surprise this brings us is the question of participation. It was because of a lack of general participation that I decided to ask a single person to respond to the exercises for me, and since each exercise had also been addressed to a singularity, it somehow made sense for this text-based response to be as well. So this is for Boat——less far, but also some distance away. I thought we would be connected by the expanse of sea next to our cities, but after checking the map I realised that the water where you are has a different name than the water where I am, even if water is fluid and I don’t want to believe it has bounds.
…
Nina and Asako made a work together in 2014 called The soup of a body past: notes on evaporation. Here is an image of the text that was printed and hung in the space:
And so I think now, along with Fotini and pictures of words, of the similarity between water and thoughts flowing between us, like ancient salts that both wound and heal us over time. Do you know the English idiom about rubbing salt into someone’s wounds? It means to make a bad situation worse, to aggravate it.
When we talked recently about togetherness, about how to participate in a project about being together, it felt almost like salt, like our non-togetherness being amplified by discussing it, and after that long back-and-forth of messages, I cried, alone. It felt bad, but maybe like the tolerance for salt, alcohol, and drugs, resilience grows with experience, so I really cannot say it was an overly aggravated situation. Unlike the connoisseur, after all this time I would prefer to make less judgements about who and what are wrong or right or bad or good. But maybe we can keep searching for new words or images or thoughts to simply keep describing the taste of these things. Like the quandary or surprise of your participation, I want to meet something outside of myself and get to know it better.
What I mean is, if it was a less than ideal situation that hardly a soul volunteered their images or words to this project, maybe it was kind of salty to finally see your contributions——several being what I saw as misunderstandings of the instructions. I think anyone who has asked anything of anyone else will know this taste. Let’s call it the strange flavour of ‘participation’ or ‘getting others to do things’, together or not. Sometimes it comes in the form of ‘collaboration’ (what Eyal Weizman calls the ‘very absolute extreme’ of participation), sometimes ‘coercion’ (what parents sometimes have to do to get their children’s compliance), and very often ‘compromise’ (what we as independent, less than star practitioners have to do within the systems that we would often rather confront). In this instance, there are two layers of participation: one requested from a general audience on the Internet; and secondly, the participation from you, which was performed as a favour to me. Both may be described as the kind of slightly disappointing or wounded salt of things not happening as were expected, but maybe I have to suck on this a bit more, to allow a passage of flavours to come through in engaging with that (non)participation. Something more like the 鹹梅 salty plums I used to love when I was a child——sour, sweet, bitter, savoury and salty.
So if I am to try to take in these five images you posted just a little bit longer, yes, some things made me squirm a little bit, or laugh, doubt, affirm, feel perplexed, and/or smile. The date 2020-06-30 got replaced by a longing for Shanghai about one year earlier, and it felt at first like a betrayal to all that 2020-06-30 means for Hong Kong. On the date of your photo, 2019-05-26, chosen for some other reason of which I am not aware, things had actually already begun boiling here. You, living next to waters with a different name, are not expected to have known that. And so your participation with rain in another city on another day defuses the centrality of importance, like maybe the way that rain probably was once a particle of air which was once part of an ocean with a wholly other name.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 2020-06-30
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Fotini
But you want us to know your name. 張小船, big B – big O – big A – big T (x2), little b – big O – big A – big T. I had initially imagined the Fotini exercise to locate searches for meaning, like when we take photos of pages from books to replace taking notes, or record signs as a way of remembering. You’ve shared yourself with us here, in a few guises but you all the same, funnily captured in a print format that is mostly outdated, though it makes sense in the context of you living now in Japan and with what I had asked you before in an audio recording also dedicated to you. So yes, ‘a lot of Boat’——meaning, and a string of things to remember.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 京蘊 Anouchka
You appeared again with Anouchka, and it was so surprising to see you, ordinarily so shy, now leaning back in this very forthright position, looking at the camera confidently, even if hidden under a cap and sunglasses. Those metal bars must be the Cuban counter to the kind of structures they put in the parks and underpasses of Hong Kong——manmade objects to keep people from public spaces. No loitering, no sitting, no sleeping. But there you are, sitting defiantly on top of them, and though it must be quite uncomfortable, you reveal in the caption the immunity offered by being in the eye of a crush. Now he is crushed in prison and your small secret opened up in the maze of someone else’s archive.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nisan
Nisan would probably not be pleased that I’ve translated her idea for a continuous line among discrete objects in this way. So maybe it is fitting that your image leaves a very small gap in the line, which, if we were to put together with the other photos, would break the horizon. It’s not certain whether this subtle subversion on your part was purposeful or simply a visual opening of the ‘rules of participation’, but I’m glad it would be you to do it, just as I am thankful that it would be you to tell me during a long and painful back-and-forth all the horrible things that have gone astray and still be my friend.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nina
And maybe that’s why the last one, Nina, is the one to end on, because it’s another intimate space between you and a lover. This time you are the photographer, but for all the power within that role it is a sudden fear from the sudden movement of his sleeping body that clicked this shutter. And this is quite a complex story for a mistaken photograph——at least compared to the majority that I had collected and cannot place at all except by virtue of the photographs taken before and after. Your photo for Nina bears similar warm tones as the ones that she has collected in her archive, though hers are mostly created by the redness of light seeping through skin.
…
I want thousands of beads of sweat from my body to seep through my skin and slip into an ocean that has one name on one side and another name on another. Sometimes these oceans are named after people, while you, on the other side from here, are named after the vessel that keeps us afloat on the sea. It was the most cheeky and romantic of things for your parents to do, but like these images, what I like most are for these smallest of intimacies to be laid bare in a plain space for anyone to know and see, the most subtle invitation for participation. An act of taking notice.
And after those long hours of talking about ‘getting people to do things’, it is still difficult to come up with answers. But you contacted me tonight as I wrote this text, asking for a favour.
So for now——simply——yes, of course.
Posted by 丫 | reply »epistolary formations (for Ĵ, Ş, Ȼ and Ḅ)
dearest yous,
digital crumbs here in response to those things you said, those things you sent, real material ways and a digital means. ‘i am sorry for the delayed reply’ prefaces so many of these formations, followed mostly by the mental hesitation for apologising too much. though it’s nice to hear ‘no need to apologise’ in response sometimes, it takes a sorry to get there. truly sorry for too many things.
lateness somehow psychologically necessitated a more involved response, if this so-called ‘publicness’ can warrant any more meaningfulness. actually i told Ḅ that what i like most here is the anonymous intimacy of passerby in public, because being an outmoded place, it’s hidden in plain sight, Emily Dickinson style. there was a period when i wrote little notes and left them in random places, too, and i found one a few years ago that didn’t get distributed, so sent it to Ẳ in the post along with a bunch of other random things, but i think the clutter of it all overwhelmed her, so there was not much conversation about it afterwards. at the time, her son could just fit the quarter-sized sample jacket i made in fashion school.
so many things need explaining.
and your faith astounds me sometimes. but i guess we still make (it) work. it’s perhaps not so dissimilar——nudity in public, intimacies for those who were never keen at p.d.a., the weaning separation from one’s body that is called a work.
Art is insufficient to narrate the inhumanity of history, because it is insufficient to explain it. Disaster is either explained by means of psychology, or the savagery of society is described as if it were a supernatural event; fascism is presented ‘as the machination of rackets outside society, not as the coming-to-itself of society as such.’
-from The Orpheus Double Bind: What Can Writing Save?, Nurdan Gürbilek
and what would you say to those that don’t watch films, don’t really read books, don’t dance? aren’t they terrible, those people, how are you going to explain it to them? how are you going to wish for them the thing that changed you and you don’t regret it not one bit, except all the times you fail to explain it to your stern mother or that person in power that you wanted to impress. you’re sorry.
Ş, i like the digitised irony that your rooms reminded me of playing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or growing up choosing my own adventure——though you don’t say ‘you’. but something like she says, it wasn’t birds but paper speaking——your real, material and actual post, Ş, so carefully bound by hand and sent to me across the Pacific just as you said you would, when most people don’t. and with that I have to tell you, unapologetically sorry, that I haven’t forgotten what I said I would send to you. it’s not ready yet, hopefully soon.
“Time the Great Healer (live at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 5 September 2006)”, Cat Power
though today i put off work to deal with a number of personal matters. and really that is an irony as well, as if they were separate in these realms, you know what i mean, but again it’s something about still learning to explain after all this time, i have to reiterate myself and you to yous again and again, because you weren’t listening and in my anger i don’t hear myself. maybe you’ll say i have to listen more in order to be heard. maybe.
i like that the package from Ĵ, one of the most dedicated in believing the romance of ‘art’ and ‘post’ all these years, came this time not directly from you but by the smooth spaces of guanxi through the editorial office of a magazine based in Spain. i like that you once fleetingly included me in one issue, and still hope that we’ll have that chance for a two-day dialogue over sidewalk beers some day.
“ピンクブッチ Pink Butch (ラララ Lalala)”, マジカル・パワー・マコ Magical Power Mako
i like that an e-mail from Ȼ seems so anachronistic amidst all of our other conversations online, that the tone differs by that very fact and that you’ve encouraged me thus to write poems in Chinese, like Ɀ also showed me, so simply, how line breaks make all the difference.
did i show you the poem he helped me to break?
每當你不在（身邊），我念及你的時候
總有許多的話，想要對你說
距離慢慢縮短，空間卻變得
越來越厚重
文字難以承載的那些話題
總與天氣有關
一種中間狀態，它從來不明白你
或者是我
我們侃侃而談
談論愛
卻總是不夠
— from the 視覺博物誌 Visual Diary Archive project “其人，其事：何京蕴 Just People, Just Timing: Anouchka”
and for Ḅ, who joined us most recently and 那麼有耐心 accompanied me 陪著我 so patiently on the 坐今天的山車 roller coaster of today:
Posted by 丫 | reply »
the news makes me cry every morning
2021 July 01, Hong Kong
我剛剛下去樓下去買一罐啤酒「慶祝」今天的節日，在Circle K被找錢，發現其中包括了一塊1978年女英皇頭硬幣。回到我樓大廳，發現郵箱裡有妳寄過來的明信片，上面寫著「Still here」.
I just went downstairs to buy a beer to ‘celebrate’ the holiday today, and upon being given change at the Circle K, discovered amidst the coins one Queen Elizabeth head dollar dated from 1978. Returning back to my building, inside the post box was a postcard from you with a drawn eye of horus and the words, ‘Still here‘.
Posted by 丫 | reply »
但願您也在這裡 （finding greetings series no. 4）
紐約 New York – 蘇黎世 Zürich
Washington Square Park
Photo: Battman
Piece of the Rainbow
©1993 New York
北伊羅戈省丁格拉斯 Dingras, Ilocos Norte – 斜坡村 Incline Village
Ilocana a Nasudi
A dance of the Manongs and the Manangs, elder couple known for their religiousness.
Courtesy of: Barangay Folk Dance Troupe
Philippine Normal College
奧克蘭 Oakland – 首爾 Seoul
Alberto Chou
索倫托 sorrento – 新加坡 singapore
Pensione Ristorante La Tonnarella
Casella Postale 22 – Via Capo, 31
Tel. 081/8781153 Fax 081/8782169
80067 Sorrento
this set was posted March 2020, three-quarters known to be successfully received, though one never realised as it was intended. i guess it’s still in singapore and you’ve moved on to taipei now, busy with digital things. then there’s one from you on the way, though i’ve also moved on, around the corner of the sea since then, and it will be a while before that post box can be checked. it’s the same post box that you sent your painting to, the one that was too small for the painting so the delivery person had used long rubber bands to strap it to the face of the box. you wished you had seen what that looked like when i told you about it, but unfortunately i had forgotten to take a photo. your painting is now framed and hanging at an odd angle from a pipe above my kitchen.
recently during a bonding session about mutual compulsive collecting habits, i told p about how i pilfer the werbung from other post boxes in my building, the unsolicited pieces that have nice plastic packaging that i can reuse to wrap other things. Once there was also a sticker advertising plumbing services, i have quite a few of them now. Very pretty.
it’s no surprise that all these things material and immaterial circle around one another like cyborgs and spirituality. he calls it the ‘eternal network‘. Looking again now from the current perspective of lonely immobility it feels sadly less anticipatory but only maudlin, a ‘radical inclusionism’ that makes most bored and need to leave the room. self-descriptive at best.
Posted by 丫 | reply »“these times”
these times
these special times
these unusual times
these weird times
these difficult times
these uncertain times
these turbulent times
these strange times
these difficult and complex times
these harsh times
these dreary times
these trying times
these crazy times
these troubled times
these pandemic times
these distressing and surreal times
these extraordinary times
these times of crisis
times like these
—an index of “these times” as found in my inbox, spring/summer 2020
Posted by f | more »|
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