een doorgeven – a passing on: wensten voor haar verjaardag van haar tante marijke. ‘tuurlijk. awkward 
pause. je ziet haar nog? longer awkward pause. 
umm…ja.
a sort of passive-aggressive general confession of not having the heart power to say it to you in person, those brief minutes that you came back, also out of guilty obligation, perhaps, to oversee the painters who actually would not come until much later.standing at attention. 
or sitting.slumped.just like not having the heart power to say the extent of one’s sadness to another’s face.the extent 
of anger.
we worry. oh, 
what a mean way to say happy birthday to a young girl!but within these marvels that lasted for days [the ogichan is sitting in a wheelchair at the end of the street], all of that happiness [the obachan bends over in front of him], sadness [unfolding the metal and rubber hinge of his chair], anger [picks up his feet, awkwardly if not gruff], resignation [and places them on the footrests], and love. 
[and love.] 
are wrapped up in me, wrapping me, and maybe the dutch say that’s just luck.so as you grow up, 
this day grown up,
it dawned,that,underneath that pervasive body of 奇怪 you were actually just a normal little girl dreaming of true love, playing dress-up 
and blowing dandelions. 
thinking of castles.but today there is some sort of certainty that it is the day you were born, years before…so a faraway thank you to your mother and father who helped you come into this world, and, yes, 
from another faraway and roundabout place, much love to you.the real world will never ruin you, like it has the rest of us. 
but you exist.
北京 北京 —- 第二
something happened at home. you stand there waiting. a phone call. sorry we don’t have the keys. we can’t show it to you now. they said something had happened at home. the land lord’s away. back in two days. —- “it’s as if you give off light” – “sorry. it must be the redness of my nose at this moment.” —- right at this moment. —- it was her birthday and you let it go by. an e-mail was written and left unfinished. ideas were gathered and recorded on paper then left undone. without a sound. —- and then you realized you had read it before only about thirty or so pages into the book. that first spring festival in this city. when fireworks were still banned. the city deserted. you were here alone. visiting yourself for a week. roaming the empty streets with a camera and some scattered thoughts. it was lying on his bed when you entered his room and immediately caught your eye. if you think hard you can vaguely remember bringing it along on one of your strolls and taking it out of your bag at the KFC at dianmen. the only place nearby serving coffee. ordering one coffee after another. it lying in front of you on the table while you stared into space and occasionally stole glances at the kids’ drawings on the wall. —- you felt his presence yesterday. a strange comfort. those dark circles right outside the window. like that night when you just sat there in the dark. music loud and on repeat and tears flowing. you had promised to go to his shop to ask him if he was willing to be interviewed. you tried to gather yourself together. a pile of person. mount it on the bike and go. eyes drying. but as soon as you got to the main street. another rush. and so you just biked and biked and biked. dongsi beidajie. yonghegong. bei er huan. andingmen. deshengmen. xizhimen. chegongzhuang. pinganli. baitasi. xisi. dianmen xi. houhai. dianmen dong. meishuguan houjie. dongsi beidajie. later you made up an excuse that he hadn’t been at his shop and you went the next day. he agreed. eyes dry. —- you run into him right outside the supermarket. bags in hand. “i had been meaning to contact you. we’ll be getting to beijing on the sixteenth.” “we’re leaving on the fifteenth.” “oh. where are you going?” “finland, norway, sweden, denmark, your country: holland – amsterdam.” —- the only one at the table saying so abruptly: “i don’t believe in past lives.” —- while you wait. an old man passes by. grey trousers. brown synthetic polo neck shirt. millimetered grey hair. in his right hand two fried bread buns. one half eaten. he walks on slowly then stops for a second. scratches his thigh and adjusts his underwear. the white station car that you had just seen pull up is obstructing his way. the station car had contained one woman, three men and one of those big tv station video cameras. one man pointed ahead “just that gate over there”, the equipment was gathered and the woman said: “ok, take us there.” the camera man wore a t-shirt with the words “i love music”. and you realized they were probably going into that house you had been before a little less than a year ago. a revamped semi-traditional beijing courtyard house. selling for in the millions. the old man walks on a bit farther and stops again. thinks. scratches his head. the car is obstructing his way. then he moves forward. grabs the railing of the fence and swiftly slips his legs one after the other through the tiny gap between the fence and the car. he walks a meter or so then stops. right there on the pavement and continues eating his buns. looking at the car and the street. —- the street bleeds with us. open. exposed. people pulling and tugging at it. ripping it open and drowning it again. now at our door. a repetitive banging on the wall next to you. a chisel and a hammer. —- completely out of the blue he writes you an email. he must have forgotten who you were. two characters and a question mark. you are? —- the dates are starting to fall from the trees. once fallen some start to rot. ants gather. a dynamic city of ants. —- what do you want for your birthday? no. please. please don’t get me anything. why do you always have to be so weird like that? why don’t you call me? why don’t you pick up the phone? why don’t you get another test? —- we start again. —- is it me – the one who screams into the well. and you. the one unable to bear green peppers and beef? —- or was it the fact that i had not come home for three nights. —- “now, however, i lived in a world that i had chosen through an act of will. it was my home. it might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance i adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something i myself had chosen. if it had problems, these were most certainly problems that had originated within me.” —- you live here more than i do. you get all the mail. another magazine this morning. green. from sweden. volume nineteen. number one. spring 2007. modern chinese literature and culture. the bank did not receive my mail and i did not receive theirs. —- you had always planned to go to the laitai flower market but you never did. she had bought seeds. and a bag of what she had hoped was soil but had felt like cement. but surely enough a few weeks later the seeds started to sprout and grow and she nursed them carefully until she left. and then the storms came again and we left the house for a week and they just sat there silently withering. not a squeek nor complaint. until today. you emerge from the bathroom. book in hand. a clear view. yellow withered stems. you drown them in water. like you did yourself the past few days. —- you’re back at that point. same outfit three days in a row. dark-ish grey baggy jersey harem trousers. a black ribbed jersey men’s under-tank. light mint green cotton blouse dress. unbuttoned. made in india. maternity wear. the one you had bought that rare occasion the two of you had gone shopping together. —- that week. the icy grey weather. so perfect for the way you felt. and the irony later was that you would end up living on the same street. replacing him. his presence if you will. as so it was he left when you arrived. a coffee and a hug and that was it. —- “they were hoping their visit would not leave a trace.” —- as long as i remember you there’s no need to remember me – please forget me, i write back. —- you wonder who you choose to confide in. —- i write him back. i tell the truth. he does not write back. —- you notice that in your absence a glass was broken. “scherven brengen geluk.” —- on the ‘to do’ list: big poop post with picture. —- a little more than a year later. walnuts have become little dried slices of yam. you try all the brands you can possibly get your hands on. —- you wonder. do you blame in general? others? me? responsibility felt as guilt. you cannot blame anyone for your irresponsible behaviour but yourself. in that distorted way you do accept responsibility. things were not premeditated. and you were never angry. it was never a matter of revenge. though you did not act to better the situation. and you apologize once more. perhaps futilely. for dragging her into your slowness. into your confusion. into your distractions. your misconceptions. —- the first word in the dictionary as it misreads your handwriting 无巴鼻 － have nothing to hold on to; be unreal. while you were trying to understand the meaning of 无为 － doctrine of non-interference; inaction. —- later i heard he was in taiwan. still later i heard he got married. —- belief. just a ball of ultra condensed energy that flows back into all things. —- nothing else.
.
entamoeba histolytica
a species of ameba that is the only distinct pathogen of the genus, the so-called “large race” of Entamoeba histolytica,
causing tropical or amebic dysentery in humans and also in dogs (humans are the reservoir for canine infections).
In humans, the organism may penetrate the epithelial tissues of the colon, causing ulceration (amebic dysentery);
in a small proportion of these cases, the organism may reach the liver by the portal bloodstream and produce abscesses (hepatic amebiasis);
in a fraction of these cases it may then spread to other organs, such as the lungs, brain, kidney, or skin and frequently be fatal.
she said she still wanted to be, and laughed at me when i said becoming
how i spent my time at the Venice Biennale, or, looking for mere life.
The crux of this situation is one of returning to an academic reportage—after the holiday, after the event, after stepping out of the heretofore all-encompassing realm that is the Home and learning to tell or recount (and what not) to our classmates, our teachers, our friends. Spending the entire summer hanging out by the pool and eating sandwiches with the crusts cut off may have been real life. But how much of a real life do we access, relive, or reveal when writing about our experiences, passing them on to others, or trying to capture them via other media simultaneous to the experience (i.e., photographs, audio recording, drawing, etc.)? If we make art from/of our lives are the results still a reflection of the world we live in, and how much do we really reveal about ourselves through the process? More? Less? Is life as recorded in a journal, a newspaper, an uploaded video or a painting symmetrical to “mere life”? Or parallel?
The question of life in art is not at least in part a question of reality and document, of truth and artifact. Insofar that life is being, it is the living element of a work of art, its energeia, which we recognise, or recognises us, is capable of moving us beyond our own mere lives towards truth and Heidegger’s sense of the world worlded, “more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.” To find, then, the evocation of life in the artwork does not set up a dichotomy as implied by the analogy of reality to document, truth to artifact. We can look perhaps more towards Adorno’s dialectics, not by way of simple polarities but a dialecticalism whereby one is contained in the other—art and life mutually inherent.Even so, the “mere life” evoked in a work of art is by no means equal to reality. The distance between the two can be described as a greater truth or a place of the spirit, but perhaps, much less glamourously—not so far off from the gap between seeing someone’s endless vacation slideshow versus having been part of the real experience. One approaches a higher plane of being, the other is, very often, just a bore.
At the Biennale di Venezia, a near Disneyland of contemporary art and national identity, we are afforded the small world after all of contemporary art multiculturalism. The short examples following interest me here as different national perceptions positioning life relative to art. The stereotypes that emerge are perhaps an ironically self-conscious colouring of the ways the simulacra overtakes us even in self-presentation, but at the current stage of hyper visual culture, it is possible in this context to raise new questions regarding art as presentation (show, artifact, material, object) versus documentation (alternate reality, report, medium, subject).Japan, History and Tradition.The most physically direct form of document was created by artist Masao Okabe for the Japan pavilion. His work consisted of a series of 1,400 frottages made with pencil on paper, rubbed directly on the surface of stones that made up the World War II bombed platforms of the former Ujina train station in Hiroshima. Okabe’s work is a document of history, a literal tracing of stone as the ultimate testament to the fragilities wrought by war, where even rock is impermanent, its solidity transferred into the grainy shades produces by a sketch, no more certain than the dead flowers and leaves pressed under glass throughout the installation. His is a document of “mere life” in its most physical approach, but its results question the viability of history via transference across artifact, time and medium.France, Love.Sophie Calle’s work can also be said to be evocative of “mere life” in the sense that it is largely autobiographical, and the source of her piece for the French pavilion is no exception, although this time Calle succeeds in moving her story outside of her own life and recapturing it through others— 107 other women, precisely. By asking each of the participants to translate, interpret or explain a break-up letter received from her lover, Calle is able to create a prism of images of the lives and perspectives of these women, revoiced in the form of dance numbers, linguistic corrections and psychological diagnoses among others. Insodoing, the acuteness of a supposedly ‘real’ emotional situation becomes estranged, dramatised and made multiplicitous. “Mere life” is simply a matter of perspective.China, Future. Cao Fei’s use of the internet portal Second Life to create her video installation for the Chinese pavilion brings ‘reality’ directly into the art world, as it investigates a phenomenon that is transpiring in the immediate present, being translated across media from a virtuality through the internet to a mass phenomenon, not necessarily in terms of users but certainly by press coverage. The irony and fascination that Second Life poses for both Cao and the media is that the form of reality proposed by it is one that projects itself as a future for everyone, and the ambivalent possibilities proffered by this future are ones that reacts back upon the present of our “mere” everyday realities. Her documentary made entirely from footage of the voyages of her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, turn the strangely connected but utterly desolate world before us into a montage of cinematic moments, like nostalgic flashbacks of something not yet experienced.
Why am I writing this again?Oh yes, Biennale experience. Mere life.Is it a coincidence that this question of mere life is actually one of the primary themes of this year’s Documenta exhibition? Perhaps we should look outside of the context of a self-inflated art exhibition towards another, slightly-less-self-inflated-but-on-the-Grand-Tour-nonetheless art exhibition to get back to this question of mere life.Or, perhaps mere life is merely in the looking.I’ll let you know after we get to Kassel.
still thinking about it
有可能，我们 ogichan obachan 的时候,还在想。你还会在我旁边吗？
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