YOU

I want to write about you so badly. It’s your nickname on the screen that clicked on my memory for you. But you don’t exist anymore. Perhaps it’s because everyone changed, or only my direction has changed. You didn’t forget me, but I did. Ironically for I forgot you so I never change my impression of you. You were fossilized in my mind. Today when your nickname appeared, I remember the forgotten ‘you’ again. If I didn’t foget, I won’t remember you today. You see what I mean? How lovely are the old-days. We chatted on the phone every night, and…and actually no more! Just ‘chat on the phone every night’. But that’s…that’s enough, isn’t it? We did see each other for a few times. How silly am I to make up stories in order to date you. Poor my friends who sacrificed to be our third party. Love always has to do with the third. Our mutual friend, mutual pet, mutual enemy, mutual dream, mutual favorites, mutual experience, mutual fetish! How ridiculous if I were to tell you that your gift for me is still perfectly placed in my little safe box? Did I tell you before that I wrote you a letter which I never put stamps on it? After so many years you called me up again. Haha you never call me for call me sake now. Everytime you have a reason to call. How reason-able you are! Of course I also pretended to be mature and composed. I wouldn’t let you know my heart was thumping crazily. It almost ran out from my mouth! When the call ended with those routine gestures, I had to forget you again. Remeber you told me so casually that you were in love? I know you meant to tell me that. To set me back? Yes you won. Since that night I retreat myself to my fantasy of lonliness. I thought I could forget you. Yes I did. but the most terrible thing is that, what you forget is what you can’t help to remember again! Today, I forgot to forget you. It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault. I am not responsible for my memory, am I? I know well that I can never eradicate you. It’s like the little magic-pad in the kindergarten, whatever you write you leave a trace on the pad. You are that bit of trace in me. Please do not react to my involuntary rudeness. And I wish not you to turn to me at any degree because the city ruin re-built, the fashion outdated recycled, the emotion friged defrostd! 

You can never exhuast my writing but memory. So long.

It’s now 5:36pm. The sky was black out an hour ago. What left behind are those lonely street lights standing in the cold. I wish I were as strong as the lights. They never have any complaints despite the never-changing environment. They are of big duties but they never show off. Without the lights, we will never see our tears, our filth, our eyes. How benefitial is darkness to our economy! It allows no pain, no disgust, no clarity. Every sincerity has melted into air. What lies behind is unbearable and that’s why we veil ourselves with a little mask. How profound is our Chinese face-changing performance. It foretells the very relationship of the crowd! I dare you to take off your mask and speak to a stranger! That’s unthinkable even compare to killing yourself in the crowd. Perhaps the severest end of a person’s life is to cry to death literally. When tears all flushed out from your eye balls, when sweat and saliva mix with your hysterical fit and vomit, all your secretions squeezed out from your face. Your death is not afar as your body gets drier and drier. Withering, that’s how the body withers like an insect’s corpse. At last any of your movement cause you nothing but tremendous pain. How precious is the pain – at least you haven’t lose your senses yet. But graudally you not belong to the community anymore. You are the sick man, the most sentimental and pathetic creature in the world. At last, you will grossly die out in the dark.

Today is the daylight saving day. We have to turn back our clock an hour earlier. They said they do it for economical reason as people can work ‘longer’ during the day time. But is longer also mean more efficient? In my mind there’s always an hour time as my buffer. Even if I laze a bit I still have a pocket of time to spare. Oh that’s what made me slack. Only after some sleep, when tomorrow comes, I will forget everything about time. I will have no memories about her evil flee in the middle of night. I will neither blame nor thanks anyone for light being saved. Well I even don’t know who I should thank if I want to. Anyway, my idea of buffer doesn’t work. I slack and feel tremendously empty. Am I alone? Physically yes. But mentally I am not. It’s exactly because my mind is not alone which causes me the very lonesomeness. I don’t feel lonesome when I am alone. My loneliness is supplemented by my gregarious tendency. A lonely person is not lonely. Only a sociable person does. My hair is like a mess. I can’t wait until August to shorten it my dear. How come cutting hair is like a ceremonial ritual? What’s going on when a stranger is cutting off something organic from your body? How hair cutting is a disgusting act and how is it not? Btw, the chinese translation of ‘mouth’ is very erotic. (please say it to yourself 10 times at a go) Besides eating and talking, you can do a lot more with your mouth. Any suggestions?

Sometimes you just lose your motivation in doing anything. It is either because we are occupied by too many concerns in life or we sadly realize that we have not a single concern to our life at all. The former is like being a slave. Chained by the people around you, you cannot cruise in free will. Apparently there is a destinated route drawn in the ocean. You are not cast away in sea, but living your life in an uncontrollable way which is justified by the others. You probably think that you are not the slave just mentioned. Then how about the master?

The latter type feels despair with h/er lack of concerns to life. Probably you have a friend like that – being sheer care-free with life, day-dreaming all the time, outside the spot light of the group, but still s/he does exceptionally well in life. S/he has no aggressive ambition but a few cranky obsessions. This dandy-type person is those who always lose their motivation in life. People think they are not progressive, not moving-on. Shall we say they are the ‘dandy master’?  

But obviously the word ‘motivation’ is ideological. OED defines the verb ‘motivate’ as “to provide (a person, etc.) with a motive or incentive to do something; to make (a person) motivated or enthusiastic, esp. in the pursuit of an activity or goal.” The word itself implies motion, progress, destination, telos. If you do not move on, it’s usually a negative saying because you make no progress to your own interest in the future. However, is progress necessarily forward-cruising? Can I stare at the past and move forward to my future? Or are you looking forward and actually moving backward? And who decide the goals or pursuits for us? Me myself? My father? Or what?

The ‘dandy master’ is quite free from the concept of ‘motivation’. Because dandy doesn’t do things according to the others. They have their own vision, no matter how naive it is. The slave can never see what the master sees. And don’t think I am going to say ‘the master can never see what the slave sees as well’. Becuase you know what, the dandy master never gives a damn to others. The dandy is de-motivated to see the other’s vision. In this sense, the dandy master is very wise indeed.

Going back to the opening, when you ever feel losing your motivation, I think that is the moment of your self-idetity crisis. You don’t feel sad, depressed or angry. But it’s a sense of weird uneasiness haunting you. Why is this annoying feeling (which perhaps force you type an entry)? Because when you lack motivation, you come to re-visit your ‘real’ self, a self that is not dependent on the others. A motivated slave is driven by a goal set up by the others. It feel so good when we were strivng for our goals, but the lose of motivation reminds you that the self you thought youself to be are merely a fake self, a pretentious self that you show to your friends, your parents, your colleauges and  your beloveds. Suddenly you, who have been enjoying from slavary for some years, are confronting the unbearable emptiness of yourself. How uncomfortable you feel when you realize that you are actually bearing an empty and unintelligible soul inside you! Do alleviate the pain, people comfort themselves by claiming that they are innocent – ‘that’s why I am empty!’ Wow, nicely done.

Therefore, when next time you feel you lose your motivation, you should realize that you are touching the most inner substance inside yourself. If you want to understand yourself more, do not let the annoying moement go. I cannot say you should enjoy it. But at least please do not be hostile to yourself for not moving-on in life. How profound the film line could be: In the movie Speed, Keanu Reeves shouts to the villain, ‘Freeze!’

Your Empathy

Just want to say, life has a great deal to do with empathy – thinking it’s possible to think the same way as your friend does. Can such mental simulation be done? And by who? Wow, this sounds like a complicated question.

Say your friend one day receives a tremendous bad news – she discovers her lover’s debauchery with a girl whom she befriend with. She comes to you and weeps; you feel her pain and bite your lips. You empathize with your friend – you try to feel what she feels. This is obviously a mental process that can never be justified because no one can dissect your friend’s brain and show you graphically how she feels. But the interesting thing is that, you are trying to posit yourself into her situation. If empathy succeeds, you will become the Double of your friend. There are two persons who exactly are feeling the same thing! If that’s the case, then how come, as a friend of a shattered girl, you can return to your own consciousness and suddenly, start to comfort her? It’s reasonable to comfort your desperating friend, isn’t it? But you were just now exactly at her position, how can you quit that role and become yourself again? If you were still her Double, and you feel equally sad, you won’t be able to comfort her. Supposedly a sad person does not want to comfort herself as well. To me your spirit has just slipped into your friend and returned secretly without her awareness. In other words, you empathize your friend and, as Bakhtin said, objectify your friend afterwards. You intrude, if not violently, into her mind and hold back yourself from it at the same time.

To answer the question, yes, empathy can be done by everyone. But it doesn’t last long. As B said, empathy is always followed by objectivation of the other. Because individual, selfishly, always wants to be an individual who is independent from others. When you objectify your friend, that means sperate yourself from her, you return as a nearly-complete subject again. But only nearly-complete remember. You, as a subject, are never complete. Therefore individulism is out of question. Empathy is rooted in your mind. It’s unavoidable to feel pity with your friends. And we can not escape from our relationship with the others. In short, or empathy in a nutshell if you like, life is always a battle field of acting as individualistic or understanding.

My mouth will be hammered with nails if everyone in the world is dead. What I speak is not what I want to speak. What I write is merely the ghostly voice of someone to whom I am indebted. Probably I don’t need to wait until men extinct. Only just the population who speaks my language turns deaf and blind then my mouth is all the way ready to be shutted.

“A child who beats another child says that he himself was beaten; a child who sees another child fall, cries.” Lacan’s Ecrits. Here the child see the other as himself. The other is a mirror; the other is the mirror image of himself. Therefore I beat you, I beat myself. I see you fall, it’s myself who falls. The mis-recognition of the self is the gist of what the styled psychoanalyst Lacan says about ‘mirror stage’. To go one step further, can we say that the child’s mis-recognition is a kind of agressiveness, thinking that the other is actually himself? Is this agressiveness also a sign of narcissism, which start engraved in us since the fastastical ‘mirror stage’?

My next next chong chair quoted Witig’s idea on lesbianism. What a coincidence that I have read relavant materials this week. Oh and I am very curious about the next next next chong. They are now in the new era. I am not sure if I should encourage them to love ‘complit’ anymore. Here’s a evil thought for those who study complit: Complit, Common-pathetic-litter(cre)ature.

A Story About Story

Tell me about your story of love. A story, I want to listen to stories. A beginning, a middle and an end. Put them sequentially, my brain is not used to non-linear thoughts. You always tell me wonderful stories. Why not this time? Can’t you just begin? Say something! Is it that difficult to begin? Right, you probably do not want to narrativize your life eh? Who cares? Life is merely one stupid story after another. Make up a story of yourself and end it beautifully. That’s what I want. You narrator, the self in other words, always postpond the ending of your story. How annoying! Narrator loves deferral but we reader craves for an ending always! Spare your reader and give us an end. Otherwise my pleasure is going to linger and extinguish at the end. Oh, I said ‘at the end’! You see! How ideological am I!  Thanks Freud! Come on. Everybody is waiting. Please don’t disappoint us. I understand you hate a contained narration of your story. But who cares? My Oedipal pleasure needs an Origin! What is origin? Origin is nothing but the complement of the End. Like your digestive tract starts from your mucuos membrane in your mouth and ends at your sticky anus! You can’t linger yourself as a hysterics anymore. Hysterics is not attractive at all if you don’t give an end to it. I’d rather hear your stories of love, than reading your ever-lasting, repetitive fantasy on people. Ever read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? That crazily thick novel filled up with his so called ‘involuntary memory’. Oh dear, who is going to read it? Please, I want a story. Beginning then middle then an end. It has to be told! It has to be done! Write something! Say something! Just give an end to it…

Wing: Abjection is a difficult concept coined by Julia Kristeva. Here’s a reference from Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection

The Man Who Lacks A Judge

The man stumbles into the library in the 19th century. Classical arches, Gothic columns, with an air of secredness, the room is filled with millions of dvds and vcds. His hands are carrying two bags of scholarships, sweating, panting. His hair is soaked with the acid rain from Africa. And the jeans he wears is a Levi’s straight cut made with a handful of intentional scratched holes. A song from the 50s disturbs the supposed quietness in the library. Btw, it’s a song in 2046 but not 1946 – an opera with a eletronic keyboard as background and the mixing of chinese instrumental sounds.

The library is huge but empty. When the man disposes the scholarships he pulls off his crown on his head and is ready to get some work done. He searches for a book and it’s only available in Retsehcnam. Then he finds a movie that he longed to get hold of. But the film is in liquid form, which means you can only watch it by ‘flowing’ it. He fetches the bottle of film from the highest row of the stack, almost falls down. Usually they the only way to watch film is to dispose the liquid into the hole and images are reproduced in the movement of liquid. Unfortunately he can’t help to finish up the film by gnawing all the liquid into his stomach. He is way too thirsty after the wandering outside the world.

The library is getting very dark suddenly. It seems the Sun has lost her gravity, falls down to Earth like the twin towers. He takes out a candle from the alter and light it with a scratch on the wooden floor. Thing farther than a metre is hardly visible to him. His stomach suddenly hurts so much. It seems something is whirling in his intestine. Probably it’s the film. He moves the candle nearer to his belly and finds something interesting. Not only hearing noises, he sees fragments of images forging on his big piece of flesh! More, instead of unrelated pictures, there’s a narration going in his body. As a filmaholic, he can’t help to study his own phantastic belly with a curious and suspcious stare.

Suddenly his hand gets hurt and drop the candle. The wax melted. Everything turns into complete darkness. Not before long, the great entrance far from the man is moivng a bit with some creepy cracking noises produced. A gleam of light, like a blade, cuts through the library and reaches the man’s face. There’s a shadow of a woman standing at the entrance. She must be the judge, the man ponders. Only when the man gets used to the agitating light and decides to greet the women, the light turns dim again. With a sudden bang. the great entrance is shutted again. And the mysterious woman has disappeared as well. From that moment on, the man realizes that he cannot flee or escape. What he can only do is to survive in this strange library. A thought flashes, ‘dying in a library is not that bad, but I need a reason for my death.’

First, how possible for speaker/writer/reader/author not speaking anymore cliches? And how does the fashion of speaking cliches reflect the nowadays world? Second, how is crime/criminal represented in literature/art/film? Is there the big real crime/criminal going on there? How criminal be represented? Third, how do the first two topics link together? In other words how do the extreme of dialogism (prolific discourses) explain the impossibility of trangress in literature?

ps. Joyce said literature is litter-ature. Haha how wasteful literature is!

pps. Schizophrenic American: speak whatever they have in mind without filtering, producing bunches of rubbish and thought themselves having a concrete and safe ego. At the same time, Bush keeps saying ‘American people’ in his speeches to consolidate the mass. Aermican feels very unsafe don’t they? How about us? We seems to be the reverse of American. Does it mean we feel very safe then.

I am a Moth

I am a moth. I fly and fly I reach the room of the other side. Lost my way, I have been looking for a gleam of light. Neither the illuminations in cities nor cities in illuminations, I need nothing but a peaceful, caring spot light. Colors make me dizzle; twinkles are annoying. For the past year I wandered in the maze of emotions, my destiny shall be a shielding and stable habitat. For how many time was I wounded? How much love did I out-pour?  Finally, tonight I have found my wonderful spot light. It is at the side of the reading desk in the room. Stupid me! I was distracted by the illuminations and overlooked this peaceful site. I have actually been home for years! That little spot light never turned OFF. No permission from my head, I re-activate my muscles and swing my wings in a flash. My fragile body cannot wait for any longer. See, the warmth and softness of the light wave her hands to welcome me. I once thought the smiley from the light is like my Mum’s caresses. And the waving hands remind me of having left the light for some years and I am now going back to her. In darkness, you cannot discern fantasy from reality. Getting closer and closer, my wings can’t stop flipping; I am out of control. To stop my fleeting body I have to hit on the light who is welcoming me. Shall I embrace the paradise, or keep wandering in the dark wood? The veiling-light is of zero distance from me. Suddenlty, her motherly warmth turns into a spiteful flame. The image of a mother changes into a mighty Sun. Alas! A sign of wisdom as well as the road to death. But after all, life is not over to death; this is the triumph of death. To be or not to be is not the question. Because, I am a moth.