Spooning Couple

Fascinated. More to come after teaching tomorrow. Errh, Frankestein again.

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Amazingly tired. We spent altogether 7 hours in the queue. For whom? For Eason Chan of course. But it’s also for the simple idea that ‘I must go this time’. Everytime when you are exhausted someone almost in the name of destiny bumps into you and a long-winded conversation follows. It sounds reasonable to take a rest after a long day. But perhaps having meaningful conversations with friends shows that you are in fact in a rest. In other words, the urge to rest takes you to initiate a meaningful chat with a friend, whom you rarely speak to. It’s exhausting. But it’s the most relaxing at the same time.

I wish I could lay on the ground like either of the Spooning Couple. I am too chaotic to achieve that. This portraiture fascinated me. The couple is less then half a metre tall. Like the size of a squirrel, it’s staged on the level of your waist. The woman is naked above; the man below. In their 40s I guess. Their skins are inelastic. The couple’s positions, like zig-zag puzzle, match each other almost perfectly. The man’s bent arms create an outline of the woman’s backbone. That bending of the arms are not common, even suggest certain femininity. Look at the symmetrical legs, as if sleeping is mere pretension. Are they posting in front of us?

The woman’s hands held together, like saying a prayer. Curiously enough, the grasping of the hands as a gesture is more masculine than the ‘random’ bending of the man’s arms. Is there a gender switch going on? The art work is the Spooning Couple. Courting of a sentimental kind, says the dictionary. Apart from the legs, there is no tangible touch between the man and the woman. The piece communicates certain idealism. The couple is connected to each other through the invisible indexed from the smiles.

We reckon the couple is in their 40s at least. But strangely enough the wax surface of the piece makes me think that they are much younger than that. As it were aesthetics overrides the banal and shrinking features of the body. Is this a limit of realism in art? Or is it a contradiction the piece is putting forth to the viewer?

Can’t help to resist my fetishism. The woman’s legs arrested my eyes. Look at the little bag of muscles at the back. That little curve with the shape of a seahorse. And yet it’s a piece of soft, elastic and invertebrate flesh. Not one you can separate from the whole. But the way in which the softness of the flesh strikes a resonance with the ambience in the piece.   

I would like to say more about the piece next to the Spooning Couple. But I haven’t got a picture with me. It’s a thirty-ish man sitting on a small chair with a slightly fearful/surprised face. A few points: the man sits half of the chair and he grasps the edges tightly with his fingers. The facial expression is fear and shock. But there’s also a resistance to pour these out, which causes a very retrained expression on the face. The fact that the man is not embracing him but holding the chair with fingers again points to an unclassifiable experience. And, the man is naked. The fear/shock/surprise i think has to do with the feeling that your body is unprotected and vulnerable. Except warmth and fashion, clothes have other functions as well. 

whim on the road

It’s interesting to see how different international and local students dress on the street. Not only because of cultural difference or things like that. A international stduent often dresses less glamorously in a foreign country. A local student, on the contrary, feels more comfortable to experiment new things on their body. I will run into overgeneralization if i continue. But for example, the way my Chinese flatmate dresses in Manchester is much less fashionable then he does back in China. It would be a great mistake if we still trust our frist impression of someone according to their clothing. But, again, this is not my point.

Outside the automatic door of Sameul Alexander building, I saw a Chinese (i think she is) wearing a pair of thick, bulking, black, slightly-heeled boots walking slowing at my side. At the next moment I saw a few local students (i think) wearing a pair of thin, weary, painful, converse sneakers. Such kind of shoes gains its best reputation in Manchester! What can we know about fashion from this contrast? Some decades ago we talked about casual wear, which means a set of light, comfortable outfits. But being comfortable is only secondary. The point is to expose your body shape to the eyes of the onlookers. In other words, the less an outfit outline your body shape, the less fashionable it is. I do not like that pair of bulky boots the Chinese girl wears. If the theory is right, i know now why I didn’t like her boots. It doesn’t fit.

A more abstract point is that, fashion has to do with self-love of your own body. No one likes to see someone being wrapped up by a bulky plastic sassauge-like coat. It destroys the body by covering it. To wear casual is narcissism in disguise. It’s not surprising then, most of the coverse lovers are young adults. Converse-mania perhaps is the most repressed form of eroticism in our popular culture. This needs explaining.

You might think that a person in obesity would be happy to conceal their body. Yes, but at the same time they are  perhaps the most anxious to exhibit their flesh. Think of a thing woman. Since when we had this idea of ‘beautfy of boniness’ (骨感)?

Vemeer’s light

What can we say about Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas? Baroque style, reference to the Bible, the capturing of infitestimal emotions. But what interests me this time is C’s use of light. Attentions are all focused on Christ’s wound, so is light in the painting. To add on that, the concentrated eye sights accentuate the abyss opened up on the body of Chrsit. In Bakhtin’s words, the painting depicts the moment of crisis (Or in Benjamin’s terms the moment of danger?). There seems to be a spot light in front of these four people. Like cinematography, like theatre. Notice there’s no background, etc. Time is glaciated under the spot light. Everything is suspended in a standstill. But this is not my point.

Here we have something very different. Vermeer’s milkmaid (1658-61). Compare the luminosity in the two paintings and how they create different senses of time. Milkmaid’s light is much diverse, scattered and softer. The pouring of the milk jar is not infintestimal. Rather, though it’s just a painting, it conveys a flow of time, that the milkmaid is indeed pouring the milk out of the reddish brown jar. I am not an art historian, but i am interested to know how the painting achieve this flow of time in a still painting. And the sun light – which is natural and differ from the artificial light in Caravaggio – puts every single object in the kitchen to the burgeoning point. Everything including the milkmaid is going to blossom. If Caravaggio is the artist of dusk, Vermeer will be that of dawn. That reminds me of his The View of Delft, which depicts the moment just after a storm. Also notice how light is refected on the objects. There are tiny little drops of paint on the bread and the maid’s girdle. The light almost hurts my eyes. But just before that the painting had the light frozen and then melted within the frame. So it’s a limited amount of light whirling, from the window to the breast, and the bread to the wall.

This is an exercise for me to articulate my layman knowledge in the history of art. But it’s amazing to see how the infintestimal can be portrayed in two very different ways. Caravaggio is baroque but Vermeer made one step forward. I wonder if this account anything about the advent of impressionalism came a few centries after. Oh, I almost forgot my other new discovery. Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910). Just before the revolution, before Kandinsky. His obsessions with the demon figure strikes me a Dostoevskian. I think there are many links between the two figures indeed. The interest in depicting chaos, the interest in the use of biblical scene, the interest in the People. Andrew Graham-Dixon describes his painting as a turning kaleidoscope, which reminds of how Benjamin describes history: a child looking through the world through a kaleidoscope, spinning it along the historical timeline. When the image comes into a new shape a new victor reigns the era. I wonder what does Dostoevsky think about this painting. The Demon (1890):

irony hong kong

Where did the AIDS aid go in Africa? Want to further develop my thoughts on irony. I havo two examples in mind and they shall be the ‘archetype’. Of course the way how the archetype leads to its own effacement will be part of the research. First, irony is a reactionary device. It’s tempting to then see why there was few revolutions in Britain. Perhaps Hong Kong as well. Second, to provide an alternative in looking at the post 80’s phenomenon, like Hyden White (?), I want to see how the whole event is built up in rhetorics. Here I shall qoute a poetry journal spotted by V, ‘The Maguindanao Massacre has not rendered us speechless; what it has elicited from us is a growing vocabulary for the condition of speechlessness.”  Any historical event in such a scale would fermentate the growth of new vocabularies. I am not sure if this explains the post 80’s. But I think the emergence of the ‘radical’ (epistemologicall means ‘from the root’) post 80’s youth was a incentive for the older generation to be ironic or sarcastic about the situation, i.e. revolt against the government policy.  Irony here seems to achieve two things in pro-authority gang, 1. it maintain a distance between themselves and the radicals. 2. it regulates their emotions. Despise is turned into sacarsm; obedience wisdom; nationalism harmony. It’s getting more complicated. The question is: do these people inherently support the government and dismiss people who disagree with it (which sounds ridiculous), or, is pro-government simply a slogan, a discourse, in which irony can perform the best, so that people’s ‘political view’ is always already determined by a series of tropes and styles? And, conversely?

I still haven’t say a word about you.

escape

Nervous. The memory of my dream will vanish at anytime. I must record it. Not every dream but this one comes to me tonight (or this morning?). We were in a team. Around eight of us I guess. Wearing bolacova and in my hand it’s a huge water bottle. I guess that was my weapon as it were. A huge building, like a hotel. Adults were fooling around, gambling, drinking, shouting to each other, no less different from a Dostoevsky scene. Our target seemed to be the head of the adult gang. Anonymous. Someone’s with me, obedient to my directions and said not a word. We were close to heart chamber but the top man was not around. In a toilet, waiting for a millionaire old man. Thought we could tackle him by splashing gas on his face (just like the scene in A Prophet). But the dream is more sophisticated than my desire. The old man has a pair of contact lens in his eyes. Unharmed, he called his senior I reckoned. No way. We rushed to the entrance. How many elevator we slided I forgot. Actions are rapid. A little bit cartoon like I would say. The entrace was there, right in front of our eyes. But something happened. It’s that moment which i have to record…

Even though my memory is vivid, my passion to write about it cools down. We were trying hard to get to the entrance. Our body laid flat on the floor and is attached to some metal plates, which facilitates the sliding. We pushes with hands, like canoeing in a gym. But the entrance never got closer. CLoser. Nervous. A song popped into the picture like a karaoke mtv. Struck. The lyrics describes our feeble situation. In fact I remembered the song came into the dream long before I recognized it. The song prefigured the no thoroughfares. No way. I thought I wanted to escape. But the song, which I am so familiar with, points to me that I have never wanted to escape. Which is my intention, if there’s one? Or is it like what Dostoevsky say about happiness, that the most happiest moment is the process of achieving it? Is there not the event of escape, but the recurring thirst for an escape? I was trying hard. Suddenly the woman who sings the song stood next to me (there’s another man next to her). She held my arm. You are not going to leave. Her face looked gorgeous. The elegance, like the millionaire, was even repulsive. Did I stop pushing my hands? I forgot everything after the sight of her face. 

I also remembered hitting the old man with my waterbottle. Not hard enough to make him bleed. And like Raskolnikov’s dream, the old man is made of some wood. Like a western paiting before the Renaissance.

how to make life meaningful?

Why don’t you talk to me? Do you despise me or what? The worse person you should talk to is an object. Dead, immobile, subject to all interpretation. Like a log of wood, which you can aflame for your pleasures. How to improve my languages? To look at the dictionary or to write poems? To burn my hair and destory my strength are the price of getting a doctoral degree? That sounds horrible. But then you never learn the importances of thing unless you suffer from it. Souvenir sounds rubbish. But when it comes along with the sender’s craftmanship, his own writing for example, it’s different. How experience matters. If there’s no more experience whatsoever, can we simply create a new word? And can this new word be absolutely outside the game? I always fancies a yes. Most of the things we can see are to be thought in terms of some antagonism. Perhaps the problem is that we want to get out of this antagonism, or dialectics if you like. But that Messianic, apocalyptic moment is simply not there. Or ironically, the moment you think it’s there, it’s gone. It will come, will come! My friend asked how to make a meaningful life. Perhaps the way to achieve that is stop asking such question. Perhaps to have a meaningful life is always a problem in itself.  What do we mean by meaninful anyway? Is working in a NGO more meaning than being an acountant? Or course not. But who is answering this question? Again we are back to this experience question. If life repeats, meanings are deprived, is that is the ‘truth’ of life, should we simply kill ourselves? Is that why the ’emancipation’ of the body has been so popular since feminism? The return to the body experience seems to be a way out to the eternal eternal eternal return. Interesting, you might want to say. But what next?

p.s. from Auerbach’s Mimesis it points out that the lack of depth in understanding will lead to bipolarization of issues. That somehow explains the extremities in Dostoevsky’s novels. All the characters takes all those European -isms crudely, which results in terrible consequences ranging from madness to suicide, from atheism to nihilism, etc. But that was the limits of the intellectuals in Russia. Auerbach wrote his book in prison. Had he not the same condition?

sketch

How important distance is in art. Photography. The ‘sunshine’ girls seized upon by the monster aperture with minimal speed. Do I like the girl, or the looking itself? You can see in China more and more young anonymous women posting in front of the camera. You don’t see that in Hong Kong, why is that? What happen to their taste? How is beauty being pushed to the most superficial value? Appearance appearance appearance. Notice the materialism underneath.

Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. Before The Law from The Trial. Come up with this idea; to write another legend mixing the two. In the former the Inquisitor gives an hour speech to the mute Christ. In Kafka, the doorman before the law says little, when Joseph K throws questions about entering the law. Two characters, one is always silent. But silence signifies contrasting things. Christ points to this unconditional faith which escapes representation. Law points to this invisible structure which gnaws you into it without lettng you go. In Dostoevsky, freedom is a horrible thing. in Law, freedom is an illusion.

I had in mind a dialogue between the doorman and a youngman.

Uncanny about the nudes I saw in the changing room. Filled with sweat and the smell of filth. All these somehow bring you to love making. As the smell penetrates you are like having sex with yourself, and at the same time seeing lines of naked phalluses dangling within your covered sight. I am no exception. Do I feel pleasurable to be looked at? I have no trained muscles. But why do I feel embarrased anyway?

xxxxx? 可以逃到那裡去?

A Prophet

If Makli is jailed because of murder, why would he feel so scared when he is asked to kill Reyep? Is it because that order reminds him of his previous murder? Or is it because he is asked to kill someone who speaks the same language? He almost weeps when he kills Reyep with that razor blade. And when he kills Maccarji, he smiles.

differences

How would you describe this ‘feeling’? That the one you are speaking to has a stark contrast with you. The differences between us fascinate me. I have no idea how to qualify this fascination. It’s not in any sense delightful. And it’s not disappointment either. But that fascination of difference. Perhaps there is too much space for the others in my head. To see differences is to see an actual splitting happening in my mind. ‘Can I not think of the others?’ that’s the absurd question I always ask myself. Those who never ask this question are outside the problem i guess. The way how we handle differences almost defines the way how one lives their life. Living or existence? Dostoevsky always leaves the emotions in his characters undefined. Something mysterious. Something out of the game of language. As a person who speaks poor languages, even his mother tongue, I think D is right. After today’s Romanticism class by the way, I am more sure that I am a romantic, a strong one. Thank you.