iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter. » 2020

keeping it together

“What exactly do I mean, even, by ‘style’? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. Form and texture rescued from chaos, the precision and extravagance of it, the daring, in the end the distance, such as I think I could never attain. As much in a person, in a body, as in prose: those people who can keep it together. ‘I like your style’ means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I’m a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above. I overestimate your power, loved writer, beloved essayist. What is it I want from you? Not quite comforting. Consolation. Is it consolation? A model of how to survive? The worst, most painful truth spoken as eloquently – or is it as strangely – as possible. The vantage it seems to me you have acquired. Of course I admire it because it seems to take you as writer, me as your reader, closer to the truth. By indirection find direction out. And so on: other clichés of the writing life. “ The problem essentially is this: I want control, and I want to let go, but neither in itself is art, and how on earth do you find a way between, a way to direct all of this ecstasy and ache? And still not lose it? (Virginia Woolf on essays: ‘Never to be yourself and yet always – that is the problem.’) Is there some combination possible of form and the formless that would achieve what I want to achieve? Is that not merely another name for compromise?”

From Essayism by Brian Dillon

Posted by f | 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 »

eliminating poverty

i went to a funeral today in my village with a cousin. she is his relative and died in hunger and coldness and illness two days ago at home. in her early 50s. the widow had spent months on bed alone, and was given a bun twice a day, later once a day, by her brother who is also poor and unable to do more. a few months ago, she almost died in a similar situation, but survived to the surprise of everyone. some villagers said given her situation, death is finally an end of her suffering and perhaps it is better this way. some said she had a soft temper. some said she was lazy and slow. some said she suffered from alzheimer’s along with mental issues.

three years ago, her husband went to a government office in the city with two boxes of apples as gift to apply for state benefits. on his way back home he fell to the ground. he was taken to hospital and doctors said it was hemorrhagic stroke and asked for RMB 5,000 to do the surgery. relatives were called one after another. it was only late at night when one relative finally showed up ready to pay. doctors did a CT scan and found his brain was already flooded with too much blood to do anything. he died.

the couple had been living in an old yard with no walls, full of overgrown weeds, and basically only one room with a bed. they had adopted a daughter from her sister from another village when the girl was around ten. but they were not able to pay her education and living costs and her sister paid. later her sister cannot afford either and the girl dropped out and went to work in the city. they devoted much love to the daughter but she felt ashamed of their poverty and hoped to have nothing to do with them. the daughter went back to her biological family and did not care very much for them. so today is certainly the last time she is in this village. it is also the end of a whole household, a family.

my cousin said the way poverty was “eliminated” here is often by cancelling the recipients’ poverty status in documents, which results in recipients receiving even less benefits. some villagers said in these two years the government offered subsidies for electric heaters so that many households had bought and installed it for just 200 yuan, including this household. previously villagers used coal, which became illegal in recent years for environmental reasons. but many families find the electric bill too expensive and rarely use it in winter, including the two old relatives i visited today who did not even know where is the on/off button.

the funeral was simple, not heavy, and cost only a few thousand yuan. my cousin, along with another relative, left before the procession took the coffin to the field for burial, partly because they were busy and partly because they knew the meal provided at the end of the funeral, which is the local custom, would not be a feast and probably wouldn’t even contain any dish with meat.

— posted with permission from an original text by Pop,
2020年12月17日，早上07:55