Baudelaire’s Intimate Journal

‘We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: Pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.’

Well…

‘To heal all things, wretchedness, disease or melancholy, absolutely nothing is required but an inclination for work.’

Sigh…

‘One must work, if not from inclination at least from despair, since, as I have fully proved, to work is less wearisome than to amuse oneself.’

: )

boredom, eternal return

‘Rather than pass the time, one must invite it in. To pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore. – To store time as a battery stores energy: the flaneur. Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered from – that of expectation.’ ([D3,4], Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin)

pulsion

You can spit on him or worship him as one of your gods. Whatever you do he stands outside your history. His past is unknown to you and so is yours him. You tried to catch up by reading and talking to his party members. You tried to imagine living in a world which can accommodate only one single ideology. You tried to appeal to the shared blood flowing in you and your ancestry. But whatever you do he stands outside your history.

It is more alienated than a step-father. At least the relationship is vaguely linked through the mother. She is always put into consideration when a revolt is carried out. Te mOther fascinates. Under jouissance the revolt  comes to a halt. But as I said he is more than a step-daddy. His power is over-arching. Yours is spectacular and futile. He lives afar. Your voice never reaches him. Distance enables the illusion that you can revolt and demonstrate (yourself). In fact this is endorsed by many others even further away from him. What the revolt aims at is to solicit a change in his mind. But every time the game ends with a virtual victory. It is not we are rebel on the surface and slave in nature, although that is very insightful, it is rather that we see ourselves as relatively free. Fantastic. ‘You see, it’s necessary for all institutions to led a double life; that is to say, it’s necessary for them to exist,but on the other hand, it’s also necessary for them not to exist.’ Doesn’t Lemke in Demons speak his mind?

The question to ask is that when and how will the illusion be undone. In response to Lemke, the son has to think likewise: to enjoy his ‘freedom’ and at the same time to realize that this freedom has not the power to alter the over-arching ideology at the top. No American dream here. The ‘freedom’ in present is cut up from that in future. The present one is physical and the future one metaphysics. Old men do not care. But youth are different:

“Behold, the realm of God is not here and not there, but in us……to be yonug is not so much to see the spirit as to being and in the remotest thought. That is the crux: we must not commit ourselves to any particular thought. Even the notion of a youth culture must be merely the illumination that draws the furthermost spirit into its radiance. But for many Wyneken us well us the have tied themselves down, no longer seeing the spirit in its ever freer, evermore abstract manifestations.

This constantly pulsating feeling for the abstractness of pure spirit is what I would call youth. Only by remaining free to see the spirit wherever it may be (and not by making ourselves mere workers for a movement) will we be the ones to realize it. Almost all forget that they are themselves the place where spirit realizes itself. But because they have stiffened, making themselves the pillars of a building rather than vessels capable of receiving and presuming an ever purer content, they despair of the realization that we feel within ourselves. ” (Walter Benjamin, 1913)

Am I too naive or my friends in my age not young enough? What are the consequences to see multiple exists in a single corridor?

It is seriously problematic to dichotomize freedom/unfreedom. And it is pretty reductive to see people living in their illusion, as if I am in a crystal clear position. What interests me is how this schizophrenic understanding of one’s execution of freedom sheds light on the whole spectrum of song lyrics in the past decade. One preliminry point would be something like this: in both the political and lyrical sphere there appears a double life. To execute my ‘freedom’ to envisage ‘unfreedom’. To go to the cinema in order to feel bored. The projection of future from the point of present. There’s no sense of eternity or idealism in the contemporary lyrics anymore. I guess this is the mode of everyday life living that half of your desire has to be cut away. The other half is then contingent to the next half . The halves chain up but they never match. How is this compared to me being paranoid? If the everyday life is lived by the soothsayer, the paranoid man lives his life as a repetition of the one single day which he has the fullest control.

Mother and Son

‘Then you’ll understand an impulse which, out of blind generosity, makes you respond to a person who’s unworth of you in all respects, a person who has no understanding of you, who’s ready to torment you at every opportunity, and in spite of everything, to turn that person all of a sudden in to some sort of ideal, into an illusion, to invest all your hopes in him, to worship him, to love him your whole life without knowing why – perhaps precisely because he’s so unworthy…Oh how I’ve suffered all my life, Peter Stepanovich!’ (1.6, Dostoevsky’s Demons)

I moved. If you care to update your old friend, come:

https://kaiyeung.wordpress.com

Dostoevsky after Heidegger

‘Ah, rest assured that Columbus was happy, not whne he had discovered Amerca but while he was discovering it; you may be sure that the climax of his happiness was perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when his mutinous crew almost turned the ship towards Europe and sailed back! It wasn’t the New World that mattered, it might not have existed. Columbus died virtually without having glimpsed it, and not really knowing what he had discover. What matters is life, life alone, the continuous and infinite process of discovering it, not the discovery itself!’ (‘My Necessary Explanation’, The Idiot, 3.5)

Nakedness

牽連，鬆綁，圍繞，擒獲，糾纏，綑綁，纏繞，捨割．

Nothing but a thread. Whether it is cotton, nylon or silk I have no idea. But what I know is the madness of it. An allegory of relations. Remember the split? No anticipation, things cut up in a second. The thread allows no elasticity. No lingering, at least at the moment when the split took place. There is the anxiety of the thread’s return. It pulls you back to the swamp. No one wants to drown themselves twice, or be entangled again in the most unproductive stage of life. ‘We have to move on.’ She said. But how do we mean by moving on? Are we in control of the thread? When the end of it is cut up, does not a ‘new’ one start grow from you and put you to another anchor? Did Dostoevsky’s Liza say that she hates her portrait of the twelve years old? ‘Don’t hang it up now…I don’t want to look at it…One life ended, and another began; then that one ended, and a third began; and so on, without ceasing. All the ends seem to have been snipped off, as if by a pair of scissors.’

She thought she has gain control of the thread. One day she says she wants to see you again. Is it possible to be entangled in a relation without growing threads into it? If that is possible is it still a ‘relation’, or simply juxtaposition of two beautiful heads? Chaos is foreseeable with the all-direction thrashing of the threads. I told myself to flee, but only realize that thread is the very structure of the game.

The structure is illusive. Perhaps that explains the unassimilable nature of the thread. It regulates, severs, entangles, infuriates, tranquilizes, annihilates, creates. I have been telling lies all my life. They ask how to live a happy life. That’s not my concern. To live a happy life is performance; it’s justification of  the idea that I am not entangled in the thread anymore. But I didn’t realize that my shell, the outer form of me, is always tied up to your shoulders. Every step I make to move forward is cancelled out by you walking the opposite direction. Shall I sever the thread? Have I the autonomy? Am I ready for this thing they called…freedom?

The thread is my flesh. I tell myself to survive is not to lose trace of the thread. Your shadow lingers at the other end of it. Fantastic. Even I perceive it from death. If someone offered me a stronger thread, a proper string, perhaps all these rubbish about the thread is no need. But where is this string? Did I not refuse the offer and place myself in this vulnerable spot? 

The severance of the thread makes me naked. Am I healthy enough to embrace my pounds of flesh? 

***

Two thing at once – being naked and letting go. How are we be naked without shame? How do we let go something without returning to it again?  All these are ‘threaded’ by a song created by a transient voice and a pair of melancholic hands. To read a song is ridiculous. It needs your timely ears to relay the meaning of it:

一絲不掛

分手時內疚的你一轉臉　為日後不想有甚麼牽連 當我工作睡覺禱告娛樂那麼刻意過好每天　誰料你見鬆綁了又願見面

誰當初想擺脫被圍繞左右 過後誰人被遙控於世界盡頭 勒到呼吸困難才知變扯線木偶 這根線其實說到底 誰拿捏在手

不聚不散 只等你給另一對手擒獲 那時(以為)青絲 不會用上餘生來量度 但我拖著軀殼 發現沿途尋找的快樂 仍繫於你肩膊 或是其實在等我捨割 然後斷線風箏會直飛天國

這些年望你緊抱他出現 還憑何擔心再互相糾纏 給我找個伴侶找到留下你的足印也可發展 全為你背影逼我步步向前 如一根絲牽引著拾荒之路 結在喉嚨內痕癢得似有還無 為你安心我在微笑中想吐未吐 只想你和伴侶要好才頑強病好

一直不覺 綑綁我的未可扣緊承諾 滿頭青絲 想到白了仍懶得脫落 被你牽動思覺　最後誰願纏繞到天國 然後撕裂軀殼 欲斷難斷在 不甘心去捨割 難道愛本身可愛在於束縛 無奈你我牽過手 沒繩索

練乙錚

Is it really going to happen in China?

當一個社會發展到某水平，例如人均收入增長至一千元，人民就會追求收音機；人均收入增長至二千元，人民就會需要電視雪櫃。當人均收入增長至三千元時，民主訴求便會自自然然出現。’你看今天的中國，中產階級逐漸湧現。當這班人累積了財富，便會置業，有物業即有業權。一旦他們的業權可能受到官員侵害，例如貪污，或者強行收地發展時，他們便會起來反抗’

fragment

It is a midnight of winter. On the roof stands a row of magpies whose radiant blue on their fatty wings do not arouse anymore. What is left is the beauty suspended in the air. I have no idea about their physiology. What amazes me is that they sing all the night. With a rich variety of leitmotifs. It is one of those nights when insomnia revisits. The songs those little genies sing pull me back to the past. Because it’s not a madeleine but a song which transforms me, I have a better excuse – so it seems – to reexperience the past and present at the same time.

It was less than a year ago when my friend living next door is leaving for good. We decided to talk over night with tea until he had to make a move to the airport. Somehow we both felt sleepy and went for a walk. It was three in the morning. The song of magpies filled up the roads we passed. I even managed to record the song with a recorder. I don’t know. But having a walk just before dawn, when the streets are empty and safe, when everything is quiet except the birds, when even the depressed soul is expressed with elated lips – I guess that is the most delicious solitude I can picture.

I guess my novel needs not to be in prose. How about in fragments? If I were to start writing it one day, I will start with a note she wrote. A document of indifference. A device to maintain distance. The most radical passivity. Why are we so obsessed in thinking ahead of time? The reason why I do not show any preferences is that I know my preference will not be sincere. The reason why I am not interested to go to a concert is that I will say to myself after going ‘well  it’s not that good’. All these horrible ennui. Why is it worth exploring? Is this not a plaything for those who are squeezed between graduation and having a job?

Curiosity is ennui’s opposite. A person who is curious lives in the present and contemplates the time to come. The curious person is reactionary to time; they dare not step beyond the present. To hold the excitement perhaps. Curiosity is speculation without doing violence to the future. Whereas in ennui you have this passivity which homogenize time, treating future as nothing different from the present. This is nothing like Heidegger, who sees Being (Dasein) as always a dynamic thing which swifts between past and future. Hence the phrase ‘always already’, or in grammatical terms, ‘future anterior’. It points to a continuous movement in Being, just like how Roland Barthes talks about in every photography there are both ‘it was’ and it has been’.  Ennui, coming back, dismisses the plurality of time, enjoying within the sphere of repetition, eternal return of the same.

This is the part of the fragment:

我就是這樣的一個人, 有甚麼好看的…我並不介意自己的身份…我才發現自己對這個世界的冷漠程度, 實在是比我想像中的嚴重得多…

Pops

What kind of affect is produced when we listen to a Canto pop song from the perspective of the past? In other words, how do we describe the experience of listening to an old Canto pop from the present? How are the affects created from the old and modern strangely put together, which pulls the subject into a nostalgic/fantastical/melancholic space? If an old song bears the power to fascinate me (but no anyone else)  in the present, is it still a pop (which is popular among the crowd)?