A note on Tolstoy

Tolstoy rhetorically says in Anna Karenina that the world is divided by two kinds of people – the thinker and the believer. Perhaps the example of cinema helps further understand the division – if there’s one. The thinker loves cinema – it might sound contradictory but it’s not. If cinema is the production house of dreams, and the thinker sees reason as the only truth, the two things seemingly don’t go together. But the point is this: it’s only the thinker who is qualified to become a cinephil. This is because deep down in the thinker there is a terrible thirst to dream. A dream of pure reason. The thinker is a realist; he cannot bear physically living in a dream; and that is integral to his thirst for dream.

The believer is not fond of cinema: why would someone who is in a dream want to dream? The believer sees the world in a radically different angle. Cinema, as Bela Tarr puts it, is to bring the audience to a different world for one and a half hour. That is a film’s basic job. If Tarr is right, there is little reason for the believer to like cinema. Zhang Tze would have no interest in going to the theatre: he is the butterfly.

That brings us to a bigger question about the difference between feminism and the ‘feminine’. Feminism aims to represent the female. On the other hand, the feminine refers to the unrepresentable, a break, a division, a rupture in the system. The thinker is critical and the believer romantic – perhaps the opposite is more true. Sometimes it strikes me that the person who always tries to represent things at the same time celebrates what is unrepresentable. Similarly, the person who is most enigmatic wants herself to be represented. And more importantly, the unrepresentable female seems to be more ready to start a revolution than those who swing their slogan ‘Hurray Unrepresentable’ in the crowd.

Of course, one can be both the thinker and the believer. And it seems that capitalism has been enforcing such schizophrenic existence. The desiring machine suddenly collapses, but everything is put back to normalcy in the next moment. In front of the believer, the thinker sees the other as unproductive, idealistic, hateful (just because he can’t be her). These binaries need to be undone. One of the ways in doing so is to seize the moment when the thinker and believer jostle. Take a picture if you will. And you suddenly realize there’s a third thing emerges from the picture. Neither the thinker nor the believer. The thought from the outside.

淺談洛謀老街 On DS’s poem Old Street

老街

老街其實不算太老
比起最喧鬧繁盛的街道
它算是年輕
老街沒有承載城市的車輛
每年興建拆毀又興建的樓房
它靜靜躺在中間
每天人們如常出入
如常上班如常卸貨
如常

在老街的中央
生長一家雜貨店
店家阿伯做了四五十年
賣米賣茶賣醬油
賣廁紙賣蛋賣調味料
年前還有單車送石油氣
不過阿伯年紀漸大
除非在這條街
其他都不送了

雜貨店繁忙不算繁忙
靜不算無聲
反正幫襯的
都是附近的街坊
和學懂幾句粵語的移工
有時阿伯晚收一點
在等他的朋友
斬半斤叉燒喝兩杯酒
四五十年來
就這樣養活了他一家
也偶爾有兩三個學生
訪問阿伯做作業

這天，老街擠滿了人
這些人拿著攝影機
竄來竄去
拍攝樓房拍攝樓梯
還有信箱和街燈
然後有人擠進雜貨店
和阿伯拍照
更多的是拍他的貨

這天，老街擠滿了人
擠滿了看了今天報紙的人
報紙說雜貨店最後今天
人們只拿來攝影機
卻沒有興趣知道
雜貨店被加租五成
阿伯今天要早收店
博物館會派人來
拿店的門牌
準備兩年以後
再仿製一個
放在這裡開業的
連鎖土產店門口

(本詩獲2009年城市文學獎季軍)

What can we say about the recent growth of local discourses? Hundred years old shops are swept away by senseless developers; peaceful lands are sold at astrologic price to the rich. Because of that loads of literary works have been produced in mourning of the death of an organic community. Not quite melancholic yet – the journals in Hong Kong are filled with mourners who aspire a better world while despising the existing one.

A set of theories about nostalgia evolves out of the mourns. Then a group of so-called scholars come after it. ‘Nostalgia is great!’ There is a problem in thinking like that. What a scholar is supposed to do is not to articulate the current trends – that’s the job of the journalist. Rather, a scholar should expose the problems lurking behind the trends. Nostalgia should not be embraced only because it becomes popular among the people. I am thinking of those so-called cultural critics who sleep in their cosy room of popular culture without being critical of it.

I read a poem written in Chinese about the removal of a hundred years old shop in Hong Kong. A detailed account. At the end the poem finishes with a critique of the developer who raised the rent by fifty percent causing the owner unwillingly to move. It’s a nice poem. But there are few things I am concerned:

i) what is valued here is some kind of authentic/traditional/organic affectation expressed in the hundred  years old shop and its owner. What is critiqued here is the senseless developer who indirectly forces the owner to move. The poem makes a pretty clear distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, presuming the removal certainly will sadden the owner

ii) but is it really the case? There is no in-depth account of the owner, neither physiognomy nor interiority. The external situation is bad insofar as someone is being forced to move – that is for sure. If this is crystal clear – why are we bothered to depict it? What’s the point to depict in literature something almost objectively bad?

iii) Perhaps a critical article citing concrete figures will do better than such a sentimentally mournful piece. This is not to say that mourning is a ‘bad’ thing. But it depends on who is doing the mourn. The writer? or the owner of the shop? Here the poem seems to be saying, ‘Look! Such a horrible developer is wrecking an old man. Shouldn’t we be mournful?!’ And yet, the reader has no idea what the owner has in mind. This is my point: the poet seems to be projecting his nostalgia onto the scene and fails to depict what actually happened from the perspective of the owner. The poet authors his characters from without, forgetting the deep feeling they should have possessed.

iv) The intention to preserve the authentic moments through writing a poem failed. In fact, ironically, the poem annihilates authenticity by objectifying the story of the owner. The heterogeneity – or the otherness if you will – of the story is dismissed during the process of mourning. The idea to preserve becomes the idea to destroy in the process of writing. Nostalgia becomes nostalgic – believing that non-existent things do exist. In philosophical terms, nostalgia is nihilistic, or sublime, to put it euphemistically.

v) That brings us to the bigger question: how to preserve the past without violating the substance which exists heterogeneously? How to raise the awareness of our heritage without essentializing the past? How to see the past as terribly ancient – which implies inaccessibility – rather than just being ‘old’? How to write his-story without the overriding ‘I’? And how would the owner of the hundred years-old shop answer to these questions?

It’s Sunday afternoon

In a wintry evening, the enormous cloud shifts above me, just as the fairy tale giant shakes the innocent earth. I imagine the cloud has always been static and it’s the globe revolving around the axis. Pictures speak to me, at least I thought so. Words are written for me, at least I interpreted so. Death has taken place, which is perhaps the reason I start writing again. Is writing not a relentless attempt to fill that loss? In this way, reading is a second-hand experience of encountering death. To read without writing distances myself from death. The writer is a curator; the writing a museum; the reader its visitor.

I was a virile man. But since the loss in a wintry summer, my body withered. All the words I have been writing are to retrieve the nutrition I was deprived. But only until recently do I realize my blood does not absorb anymore. The way in which carnival disguises melancholia is what flesh does to bones. The felicity of the feast overlooks the loss, wrapping it like a present, tricking the eyes which are thirsty for presence. Gone is the deadly space between the bones. Yet the deprivation is always already there inside, no matter how much flesh is lavishly filled.

JS Bach and Cinema

I was listening to Hamari singing St. Matthew’s passion again. Below the youtube clip there is a comment goes like this:

‘It goes deep into your soul. It is the most beautiful involvement of a interpreter with a work. She was in a trance. She was out of this world.
No words. Just watch, listen and get out of this world for some minutes with her.’

I almost believe in what it says. To what extent is it possible to get out of this world by listening to music? If music is able to open up a space of eternity, what happen when it appears in a temporal medium like cinema? Would cinema deprive musical eternity, making music – Bach in this case – less sacred? After all people listened to Bach in the church. Is it always the case that classical music becomes cliché when it’s shown in cinema? Think of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008). What strikes me is the way in which music pulls the audience into the state of timelessness. I don’t mean background music. St. Matthew’s passion for instance. In a Bach concert you know very well that you are entering a ‘different’ world and you are ready for it. But in cinema it’s more cruel: it tears you off from musical timelessness and throws you back to Time itself. ‘The images are moving, look at this!’ The chasm between the ears and the eyes is like being disturbed by the tourists when looking at Michelangelo’s paintings.  Tarkovsky called his cinema the sculpting of time. Isn’t that the perfect definition of cinema? The phrase doesn’t simply mean cutting out ‘useless’ time until the film is full of the most ‘beautiful’ times. Rather, like the way sculptor leaves holes, gaps and spaces in their art work, the director leaves ‘timelessness’ as part of the film. A cliché example would be the two massive empty space digged on the site of the twin tower in commemorating the dead. That said (a phrase my friend often uses), I need to prove that either classical music is able to reach a sense of eternity, or cinema has the power represent music as out of time. Watch the first 20 mins of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice to convince yourself. Or, to start with, watch Hamari singing Bach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPAiH9XhTHc

the lightness of time

A man pushing a little baby car in the corridor. He was making funny faces to the little one in the basket. When his eyes met mine his face became serious. If he is a Dad, perhaps he is still not used to show his naivety to strangers. I saw this man when I went to my office. Sitting in front of my computer, I saw him again from afar strolling with his baby car. All these remind me of A Serious Man, which successfully captures how multiple timelines often intersect each other. The man was waiting for someone perhaps, walking aimlessly, but still bearing the responsibility for the little boy. I was sitting in front of a machine, relentlessly trying to type some words on the screen and hopefully someone will read it and say something like ‘oh, this is interesting’. This is like the tortoise/rabbit race in the everlasting fable. But this time, when the rabbit meets the tortoise on the track, the witty one experiences something strange. It doesn’t feel proud of running so much faster than his opponent. Rather, enormous lightness surfaces inside him. The rabbit weights lighter than the tortoise. At this moment it is even lighter. It forgets – if there’s memory – the race, even its own existence. It feels it doesn’t belong to the world it inhabits. Effacement of the self. Neither happy nor unhappy. It’s a matter of lightness.

And then, Myshkin has a dream in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot:

‘It was in Switzerland, during the first year of his treatment, even during the first months. He was still quite like an idiot then, could not even speak properly, and sometimes did not understand what was required of him. once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every ‘little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus: knows its place, love it, and is happy’; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.’

montage of signs – two dreams

How do I narrate a dream which has no logical sequences? A boy I loved and a fucking scene. Did I fuck him? In another frame I masturbated in the corridor, which was discovered by a woman friend. Annihilated by shame. Then I dreamt of viruses in my body. A friend of mine – had no idea why it’s him – who has very dark skin revealed to me that he had it with a prostituted during his stay in a Christian fellowship camp. He contracted some serious virus and had been taking pills. I was shown the pills in the tiny ‘football playground’ in my high school. He was my high school friend. I walked fast from one floor to another. There are altogether 14 floors. Every time I passed a classroom I tried to throw my glance to the teacher. What’s going on inside?  Somehow I was waiting. For what I had no idea. The school is entirely silent. No student giggles nor teacher orders. Everything was so mute that I could even hear muteness itself. Like some sort of machine howling patiently. Am I waiting for the boy I thought I loved or the teacher I adored as Dante’s Beatrice? It was a hot summer I am sure. So the whole building should be empty. Why could I see students and teachers, even janitors and administrative staff? Is the school haunted, or I am haunted by it? No ending, as I woke up involuntarily. I tried going back to it but obvious I couldn’t.

This is even more obtuse. Flocks of naked and dirty men. I gathered that they were butchering people (or were they butchered being?) for the ingredients of some delicious Chinese dim sum. A young man whose penis was huge was covered with mosaic appeared on the cover of a magazine. There were other images but I forgot. Then the latter part was a mysterious but beautiful scene. Me and a my friend  – a woman but I had no idea who she is – are looking afar at some eggs lying on a grassland (a spot I walk by everyday). It was raining and windy. The eggs were tiny and somehow packed in a fresh-food transparent packet. Disagreeing with the woman, I bet the howling wind will move the packet, pull itself into it, and finally raise the whole thing into the air. She did not believe. Some light illuminated the field. And the wind began to raise the packet. The eggs were changed. Indescribable. The eggs as if penetrates through the plastic packet and suspended in the air. Don’t know if it’s the egg yolk or the light, the eggs were golden. All these took place when the rain was just about to stop and the Sun was going to pull the rainbow up in the sky. I was so excited that it went as I expected. While I was trying to make sure I will remember all these images, my phone rang.

Paranoia is about the insistence on boundaries whereas schizophrenia lives with their dissolution.

purloined letter

When he talks you can’t stop him. I don’t know why. But it seems that he is trying to deal with some sort of anxiety by keep on talking. My question is engulfed by his endless replies. Very helpful indeed. But apart from answers for questions, he is like confessing to me. No eye contact, like the way in which the confessional constructs the space of hierarchy. It’s interesting that my friend who has issues with him speaks in exactly the same way. X does not know his problem. Y knows and loathes it. But Y does not know that her problem is the same as X. Perhaps only Z can tell the irony, as if Z is outside the problem.

Secret

What is a secret? When I say, ‘I will tell you a secret’ , the secret is exposed to light. The secret is not hidden anymore. Secret has the potentiality to become a non-secret. Playing with that makes the secret-teller happy. To manipulate a secret, to choose whom to confide, to take it like a nutrition tablet in feeding your melancholy – secret is the armour painted on yourself. To keep intact other people’s secret is to show respect to heterogeneity. But to manipulate my secret in relations to the others is appropriating heterogeneity into something predictable. Perhaps the issue here is gendered as well. It is true that to keep a secret is important. But it is also true that to keep no secret is unattainable. This is not to say impossible. Just like insomnia, the last thing to do is to force yourself to sleep. She who has no secret has not even the concept of secret in mind. Absolutely transparent. Like schizophrenia, the mind dissolves into the world. Perhaps she is able to free herself from within, untie herself from all kinds of neurosis which only happens to those who make a distinction between inside and outside. Is she a psychotic then? A psychotic has no secret. Everything will flow, which could be organic or mechanic. Sometimes I turn the inner most secret into everyday small talk. in other times I speak of my most trivial pain when the thunderstorm reigns. Tragedy! ‘This is between you and me.’ The secret is staged. Are we in the gutter, or posing for the star?  What makes me anxious is not that there is a secret which I cannot comprehend. Rather, the realization that there is no secret behind the face terrifies me. Terror, of course, can be pleasurable. But how many of us can take that?

Eason Chan and universal suffrage

If football is an erotic sport, how about basketball? And what about the idea that rugby is a middle-class sport? I lose my depth in argument. Like a fly tiptoeing on a pond, never get inside it. What’s the problem with me?

System determines how politicians act. Just because your power is shared by someone else, you need to learn rhetoric to persuade your comrades. This is how the Roman rulers  learn the importance of public space. Despotism is not possible within the system. What you can do instead is to regulate the people by offering limited freedom, as illustrated in all the activities found in a public space. Look at Trafalgar Square in London, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Victoria Park in Hong Kong – what are these place if not a valve of people’s restlessness? I wonder how much public space we can find in China. You can’t do anything in Tiananmen Square can you?

I wonder if there’s any connection between my restlessness felt for this Sunday re-election and my little tears coming out when listening to Eason Chan. Apparently there’s none. I guess I can befriend with someone who loves Eason pretty easily. Similarly, I imagine I can befriend with someone who is going vote for the referendum. In both cases me and my ‘friend’ probably share certain memories, beliefs, tastes, affections, etc. The question is: how likely that a Eason’s supporter is also a support of universal suffrage, or vice versa? It sounds ridiculous. But there’s one thing which bring the two feelings together: in both activities there are intense emotional  impulses running inside. And these impulses are never disguised. There are deep feelings in Eason Chan’s performance. Similarly, the people who take this re-election seriously as referendum have deep feelings inside them. It is this deep feeling which moves me. To be moved by that somehow indicates that I am capable of feeling deep. I am not saying that I share the feeling of Eason or the resigned councillors.  I am saying that their actions affect me, leading me to find my personal feeling which is integral to my particular memory, taste, belief, affection, etc. When my deep feeling is acknowledged, strangely enough, yourself dissolves, what people called ‘subjectivity’ evaporates.

This bursting of deep feeling inside is an absolutely contrast with what I called the puppet space. Here I refer to all kinds of pretension art ranging from our governors’ speech to singers who fail to communicate deep feelings. I like Eason because he is true to himself. This is the same reason that I respect the five resigned councillors. You might argue that pretentious people are also true to themselves. Perhaps. But one thing they do not do is to communicate deep feeling. They are too lazy to seek deep feeling inside. They’d rather suppress that and follow people’s nose. They govern in the way they were asked to; they sing in the way they were taught. Ultimately, there’s no deep feeling in politics. All vessels are turned into pillar supporting the crystal palace. A nation belongs to the lethargic men.

Deep feeling is there. But how can we be sure we don’t suppress it? We don’t find deep feelings everyday, and it’s definitely not simply a cheerful moment. How much do we need that feeling? What are the problems if we forget its existence? What the world is like if there’s no more deep feeling?

a new project; a picture without the sky

Schizophrenic existence of Hong Kong. Choosing 7-10 texts for analysis. Arguing that under double colonializations Hong Kong survives in a schizophrenic mode of being. The split condition is integral to privitization of experience, individualizing civil activities, etc. Hong Kong is too busy with their own ‘businesses’. To go against the authority, to protest for universal sufferage is too altruistic, and more importantly too monological for the schizophrenics.  Perhaps a new form of revolution is looming? A revolution without power surge but a series of short-curcuits which paralyse the system?  All these fragmenting forces in the city contribute to the absence of politics in Hong Kong. Or should I say a new form of political activities is in fermentation? Abbas’ politics of disappearance should be also read as the disappearance of politics, the disappearance of a one to one antagonistic struggle between the state and the people. The future will be more scattered and difficult to conprehend. Schizophrenia shall illuminate this. The gloom of 2047, the ethusiastic lethargy, the transient space of Hong Kong – all these are important for us to face Hong Kong’s future. Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus will be crucial to this study. The linguistic habitat, education cirriculum, pop songs lyrics, cinema, post/colonial architecture, desmonstrations – all these will be looked at in details to illuminate the schizophrenic force which shakes the Habour.

The milky sky in Manchester destroys the depth of my picutre. The trees from which the sakura-like flowers wither are as if displaced. An ordinary tree becomes no more real than a props made in a studio. The clouds fill the depth of the sky which now becomes a depthless space. Gestalt works perfectly at this point but it’s also the moment of hyper-reality. I can’t quite distinguish whether the tree in front of me is real or virtual. Am I right to say that our 3D vision becomes more and more two-dimensioalized? Antonioni’s Blow-up is a classic. The chic photographer captures a park scene on his negative film. Only by blowing it up does he discover that his camera captured someone’s death. Technology sees the truth we don’t want to see. But it’s also teahnology which two-dimensionalizes the truth so that we are able to comprehend, reflect, even investigate it.