On the moon

‘Suppose you lived on the moon, suppose that there you did all those ludicrous , nasty things… From here you know for certain that there they’ll laugh and spit on your name for a thousand years, eternally, all over the moon. But you are here now, and you’re looking at the moon from here: what do you care here about all you’ve done there, or that they’ll spit on you there for a thousand years, isn’t it true?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t been on the moon.’

(Demons, 2.1.5)

黑犬

生於斯, 隱於斯,  如斯顛倒荒誕之時, 甘負黑之逆名, 甘抱犬之謙卑, 行時不張, 默時不讓.

– 黑犬

The city is absurdly blackening. Before it was dog as man, the domestication of beast, the exhibiition of ego. But today the desiring machine is broken down. Blasting out from the dismembered joints is a pool of black blood. Men do not destroy the status quo by transforming into a super-man. What the SAR machine fears most is not the chief. Man as dog. Man can only call a halt to the machine by turning himself into the lowest. No dog-man but man-dog. It’s only the state of urgency when man-dog is needed. Perhaps that is also the moment when the limits of everyday man surfaces.  It does not translate into ‘underdog’. Man-dog is more than that. It’s not a matter of win/lose, over/under. The task is to jam the machine from without, not hoping to triumph one day. The triumph, if there’s one, is always there to come. It has always to be black, even on the day of triumph. If Baudelaire worn black to invent himself, dog-man is black. This is not self-fashioning. It’s closer to the work of mourning, but the other’s death shall be the log of the fire, supplying the black enthusiasm in it/him. Black is the only colour which can express the deep feeling in this city; dog is the only animal which can picture the frenzy in abeyance, awaiting to bark, to dance, to laugh, to fight. If you understand the above, you are happy to have dyslexia.

unthought in thought

‘To think the past against the present, to resist the present, not for a return but “in favor, I hope, of a time to come” (Nietzsche): this means making the past active and present to the outside, in order, finally, for something new to happen, and for thinking always to happen in thought. Thought thinks it own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present), and to be able, finally, to “think otherwise” (the future).’  – Deleuze.

deep feeling Pa

On the phone uttered Pa’s unfamiliar gentle voice. Father and Son. One in Hong Kong the other Manchester. Both are not in China but cannot help to mention her in that pretty dry conversation. After all, what can two men talk about if not the business of motherland? It’s her who refreshed the dead air cloaked with volcanic ashes. ‘Are you going to vote on 5.16, Pa?’ 10 seconds passed. ‘I will, of course.’ ‘Can you ask Ma to vote as well?’ Whether my short-lived passion triggered Pa’s long-silenced political view or he’s been looking for someone to unburden the seal inside him I have no idea. But he mentioned Old Wah, the man who symbolizes the long-term struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. ‘He was still virile this New Year when I saw him in Victoria Park. But now no longer. He looks so thin and fragile on tv today.’  An old man dying with cancer is within the imaginary of statistics. But Old Wah’s dying is more than that: for the mass, it symbolizes another defeat in the course of struggle. Sisyphus needs replacement. The moment when I heard Pa’s disappointment with Old Wah’s health, tears felt in me. Old Wah’s deteriorating health was no news. And his death will be too abstract for me to mourn. What pulled me into (potential) tears is Pa transmitting Old Wah’s potential death into my ears. True. It’s Old Wah’s death, but it’s also Pa gaining life. I can’t imagine him saying this to anyone except me. An exposure of your pity towards another old man in front of your son. It’s laying down the armour. Father giving in to his son, and the vice versa, which one can be done easier? It seems that Old Wah’s death shall abridge the gap between two generations. Perhaps this is the first time Pa ‘made’ me cry. For what reason I don’t know. What I know is that that was a moment which cut me. A deep feeling. If I wrote an epic out of it one day, to which I owe the most is someone’s death.

沉默中死亡

1. map out the protests took place since 1997.

2. take out the values and interpretations.

3. stick with the facts which seem unrelated to each other.

4. rearrange them into short stories, almost like fables. 

5. be as dramatic as you want. But make sure to take away any attempts of justification.

Death’s space

The best of what I have written is based on this capacity to die content.

I do not separate myself from men in order to live in peace, but in order to be able to die in peace.

– Kafka

The weakness of suicide lies in the fact that whoever commits it is still too strong.

– Maurice Blanchot

How does reputation influence an artist’s work? Michelangelo knew his fame long before he died. Thanks to Vasari and the wealthy patrons, the Renaissance artists who are famous today were then no less famous. What was the driving force in Vasari’s privileged sons? To overcome another technique? To surpass the previous masters? Or simply, to become more famous? In the Prado Museum we witness not only the brushstrokes of genius but also their fame. Audience stop by a painting not because of any philosophical allurement, but simply the work of a unbelieveable pair of hands. Awed by technique; form, to be unfair to the Renaissance men.

This you don’t see in Munch, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso. The fascination of technique, the association with genius. Since the 19th century there was scarely a genius who did not lived in melancholy. Always in the space of death. As it were modern art has wedded art and death, which gave birth to the alienated audience.  In any modern art museum people do not ‘study’ a painter anymore. Just like you don’t ‘study’ Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Contemplate is the word (although we also have contemplative activity in the Renaissance with minor paintings). The painting is no longer the subject which seizes you. Rather, it becomes objectifed by the audience’s contemplative look. ‘What has this painting to say?’ A question never answered during the ‘modern’ pilgrimage. Whereas a Renaissance artwork is ornamental, modern art is tabula rasa, a text to be interpreted. Francis Bacon for instance, abjects the viewer only to create a death’s space for much deeper contemplation.

There are modern painters who are reputed before they died. But their reputation most certainly did not originate in their celebratory genius. They have something to say through the art work. The urge to express something other than art itself (or art as such – two extremes) characterizes what we called modern art. As Blanchot says about poetry, the art work is mind itself, ‘and the mind is the passage, within the work, from the supreme indeterminancy to the determination of that extreme.’ (The Space of Literature). 

If that is true, can we say modern art creates a relatively dialogical space? Or, a more preliminary thought, modern art brings art into the realm of language, as art is the artist’s consciousness. And since one of the recurring force in modern art is that of melancholy and destruction, can we say that modern art paints the artist’s relation with the art work itself? The anxiety of the ‘death’ of the work, hence the fear to start painting a work. What are the relations between artist, their work and death?

Did Ashley Gorky once say that he never finished painting a work?  

(written during the nauseating  heartbeat, after Gorky’s retrospective in Tate, reading Blanchot on suicide and one of the most desperate moments in research.)

Gould and gluttony

Gluttony: mis-communication between drives and my organs.

Is Glenn Gould’s hum not a complement to the Bach he plays? Is this not Benjamin’s ‘bodily presence of mind’? Is Gould’s recordings not the last document of modernity, when technical ‘errors’, or shall I say madness, was still allowed?

Benjamin seems always have primal history in his mind. I wonder why.

The Father of My Children/ Irony/ 陳奕迅

Burning myself down. Still. Some thoughts yet be put into words:

1. Some afterimages of the film. Not very good. But the two children actresses fascinated me. Whether it’s the unpretentious performance or performative unpretentiousness which grasps me I have no idea. The infant character is not bother to turn back their gaze. Do they satiate my voyeuristic drive, or open up a unprecedent cinematic experience which explodes the distinction between a public and private space?

2. Just like what Benjamin says, the more I try to say something new, the sooner do I sound boring. My two friends try to – at least seem to me – denies their national identity when living in their country. Some sort of thirst for cosmopolitanism or invention of the self? The harder they try to ironize their nation, the more ironic they themselves become. Someone escape by being ironic, but he is ironically trapped in a more immediate irony – he becomes an irony from my point of view. We thought we are witty when we say one thing and it means the other. But this thought fails to escape from being repetitive, old-fashioned and pretentious in others’ eyes. The more fleeting my intention is, the more stagnant my identity becomes. No ironies.

3. Why do I like Eason Chan? I think I can write a book to answer that. Perhaps I want to say something about Stardom as well, which I will probably repeat what people said. There are several things strike me with Eason:

a. I like Eason not only because of his songs. His character presented to us through the camera is not less charming than his voice. What is so attractive about his character?

b. I guess his character in many ways expresses the attitude towards life which many of his supporters aspire. Eason’s unpretentiousness, his enthusiasm, his disinterest in politics and power – all these are attitudes his supporters haven’t and will only aspire to possess in their most abstract terms.

c. Eason’s songs are often revealing in their lyrics. Or shall I say they often capture momentary feelings in everyday life. The songs are commentaries on life, even life philosophy. If that is true, Eason will be the most alluring mouthpiece to spread the propaganda. And yet, with broad and fresh voice, Eason almost becomes an advocate of what is trasmitted through your earphones. Passion explodes the words which tear through the screen and echo in air. Is the lyricist Lam Chik speaking, or Eason singing? Do the lyrics recall or rewrite my past? Is it a love scene I experienced before, or is it a scene which I always have been fantasizing in my mind?

d. Although Eason’s songs are most of the time gloomy, I don’t get too upset for listening to them. I don’t mean the songs are not powerful enough. But there seems to be Eason DUO at work here. The singer poses a problem in life through a song. In the next second the problem is dealt with, even cancelled out by the singer himself. I have mentioned the playfulness in Eason. Eason the singer throws a problem in music. And then Eason the bloke disburdens all problems with his foolish laughter.

e. There is an issue about delusion, that problems seem to be solved are only neglected by frivolity. Pop songs cannot be defined without this: its repeatability. Every song repeats for nobody knows how many times in all kinds of audio passages. If the dialectics work like what I have suggested, it comes to place every time when a song is repeated to your ears. You are not blind to the problem (the song poses) anymore as it is thrown to you so many time. And the playfulness of the singer – Eason in this case – not only unburdens the problem, but also gradually form an attitude inside you. In no time you didn’t learn to be like him, but that his attitude grows through your eardrums along with repetitions.

4. A rthk interview of the Hong Kong pioneer of green life. (薇薇語)

5.A rthk documentary on Hong Kong universal suffrage and the five district re-election. (鏗鏘集)

mutual love

‘Perhaps I really will become a nurse if I don’t manage to die this very day; but if so, it won’t be to nurse you, even though you deserve a nurse as much as any creature lacking arms and legs. It always seemed that you’d take me off to some place where an enormous, man-sized evil spider lived and we’d gaze at him for the rest of our lives and be afraid of him. That’s how we’d spend our mutual love.’ (2.3.1, Demons)

never more than a second

What if it is a disease? What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analysed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection, and gives a feeling, undivined and undreamt of till then, of , proportion, reconciliation, and an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life?

I guess I know what ‘unbearable’ means. It simply means death. Haven’t read the novel yet, but the title – the unbearable lightness of being –  is illuminating. Not that it’s too heavy you desire death. Weight only accentuates guilt and responsibility, making life so meaningful that you simply have not the time to fancy death. Lightness is a horrible thing. It’s light because there’s not a definite cause; it’s light because it’s free-flowing; it’s light because it trespasses from present to future and the having-been. Video-taped madness. Images fleet through my pin-hole like pressing the fast-forward button. Mute, or death? I cannot bear it, but who turned on the screen?

I see among those images two women caressing each other. I never saw that. It seemed completely normal to me. But when this image flashes up again (back then I perceived the situation in words, now the sign comes to me as a strange image). Nausea. The images throw my mind up. Not because of the impropriety of the signified. But precisely because – if only I know why – of the banality of the caress, the meaninglessness of it, that makes the influx so nauseating. No. There are hundreds of fragments. Why do I come back to this one, which never took place in the real? No. No matter which image resurfaces, the dread is there, the image has been. Return of the same makes me despise everything. And yet everything keeps flashing across the pin-hole camera. An urge to suspend the machine but that will only cause complete breakdown. It’s at this point I think of the Dostoevsky passage. It’s at this point I can’t think of anything else but that I am ill.

Only until the very last stage in my thinking do I discover the creative side of the unbearable moment. If not, why am I writing? The unbearable of lightness fails me. I will never be able to ‘capture’ the moment of death or the wish for death. But like a war photographer, you do not want to miss a single moment throughout the event, even though you know very well that the instant you capture is nothing more than an index. It has been, and it will be. Or like the collector who never stops while he can never complete this collection. Re-collections. Is this a vision, or re-vision?

The cloud lets the sun rise again and the wind hides their roar. Rain stops and the magpies hum their morning songs. Has the night eaten up my dread? Or did I just press pause? I thought I would finish myself. As an idea, I switched that off. If consciousness is thoroughly a photographic machine, how can I possibly mean to say something is unbearable? Or does that machine belong to some organ who witnesses its repetition and thus says a categorical no?

If in that second – that is to say, at the last conscious moment before the fit – he had time to say to himself consciously and clearly, ‘Yes, I could give up whole life for this moment,’ then this moment by itself was, of course, worth the whole of life. (The Idiot, 2.5)

I cannot close my eyes – there is still gas in the stomach.