Buxtehude

Any of his works is a fantastic pair of ear-pluck spares you from the boiling, stuffy, cataphonic world. Of course, never do it with earphones.

irony

I think she is the best example of an ironic woman. In she irony is used as a rhetorical device to control her anger. From that irony is also a way to create distance between self and the person your emotions are attached. And who is being ironic here? The person whom the irony points to of course. But she, the interlocutor, is also caught in another form of irony. Every time I look at her sarcasm I can’t help to treat her as an irony of herself (or woman?). More examples are needed here. But I shall save it for next time.

dinner

Today, as usual, I had dinner with him. But this time we have two more guests. They are my friends and I was glad that they join the meal. I felt very tired after so many things: the gym, lecture, teaching and the reading group on Benjamin. Can I not go to the dinner tonight? It’s hard to say no in this occasion. The meal went okay in the first hour. Then I felt like losing my energy. Plus the British English the three of them were speaking with their cups of wine, I spent my leftover energy to comprehend their literary references and jokes. And then he kept on talking about opening a new course next year. My friend asked, ‘any plans for the syllabus?’ I do not care about the syllabus. No that’s not true. What I do not care is he speaking about the syllabus he has in mind. Well, perhaps i was too tired. But then he moved on to this business about having someone written a nasty review of his book, which the publisher was so generous that they didn’t allow him to read. I read his book. It’s not particularly inspiring. Negative reviews are no news to him or me. What did they drag on this business for almost half an hour? I couldn’t bear and said I have to make a move. By the way, the wine h serves is awful comparing to the one my friend brought us. It’s not that I am not into wine. But a it tastes like gasoline and b I had not the mood. The whole conversation was as dry as the second rate English fiar-trade tea leaves. Perhaps I was too tired. But perhaps it’s only my tireness can show me what my guts have to say about all these banality in life. Sometimes the ambience gets so mediocre that your own language is contaminated with all sorts of dull colours as well. Full stop.

teaching

How to become a good teacher? If the students say you are good, does it mean you are objectively good? Quite obviously not. They say you are good sometimes simply because they feed you with information. A teacher can’t be universally good, especially someone who teaches literature. Which one would you like to be? A teacher who gets extreme comments, or a teach whom everyone says, ‘he is okay.’?

My colleague is typing the keyboard hard. Thombbbb thombbbbb thombbb! It reminds me of the days of type writer. Btw he has the habit of writing his essay on a piece of paper before putting it into MS word. I often think these people have clearer mind. I am chaotic. There is a very strong discrepency between my consciousness and body. My body is extremely sensitive but my consciousness is too sober to realize that. It has been always already chaotic. Why do we need to tame it? I don’t mean to write crap in this blog. But I did. I better stop here now.

first blog

I wish this was a private space. Private even to the most intimate ears. I wish this was a public space. Let it expose to the most random eyes. I wish this could be the preface of a novel,  a novel made of fragments. Is this what they called style, or simply my irresponsibility to language? I don’t know. I guess I am a obshchechelovek.

Jostling archive

Jostling, bodies jostling each other. It supposes to be shoulders. But no: bodies, every part of the body jostles with other bodies. It is almost like fighting, this time among organs. Jostling implies plurality: one cannot jostle with himself. It designates the pressing contact between me and you. But that contact at the same time unveils my hostility to you. If there’s no aggression, where comes my desire to jostle with you?

The friction aggravates. Your shoulder opens up a slit where blood becomes red (I thought blood is colourless). My stomach, fortunately, is lubricated by your secretion and manages to keep my blood from turning into colour. Bruises instead surface on the tip of my belly, like the reddening nipple of a fresh breast.  Your shoulder and my stomach are not supposed to meet, like every jostling, which is always an unexpected bombardment that arouses our underground hatred against the other.

Could we have not met each other? Tonight I will have forgotten your wound and healed my bruises. If my memory for you last such a minimal time, what was the significance of knowing you? I did not expect to see you. You are outside my calculation and principle of causality. I thought I could master all my actions in life. But you intervened in a sudden while I was trying to rearrange my life. The jostling happened just at the moment when I came to make sense of my past. My past now left a gap; a gap that shakes my archive. Your wound is invincible.

Why one is not happy?

There are all sorts of answers to this question. One of the them would be that one cannot actualize his/her will(s). For example if i want to have deep-fry osyter cake while living in Britain which offers the most terrible cuisine in the world, my will cannot be actualized and therefore I feel not happy. That is a trivial example but variations of it happen everyday, from failing to possess a commodity to being pestered by your boss. This kind of unhappiness will lose trace quickly. For the sake of argument, lets call this the unhappiness in the present.

I want to make a distinction between being not happy and being unhappy. I see the latter as a more pretentious and self-deceptive phenomenon, which deserves a seperate discussion. Going back to those who are not happy. Most of us bear a wound (at least one) in oursevles which causes pain. The pain however is unconscious, and is often triggered by some unexpected event. To be more precise, it’s not an event which causes these pain: it’s certain thought vaguely contructed in your memory which releases the dam of pain. This pain is not physical, but it’s always the mental torture which gives us the most painful.

This pain, to which I called the unhappiness in the past, can only appeal to human being who has the capacity to reflect on things. He reflects on what he did and what he did not do in his life; he reflects on how people judge himself; he reflects on whether he has fulfilled his responsibilities. All these questions trouble him. Some of us are able to shed the burden immediately. But people who cannot leave his ego aside will inevitably suffer, regardless of one’s gender.

To cut things short, I want to bring in the third kind of unhappiness, which is that in the future. This unhappiness crushes you to the bottom, ceases you from actions, freezing every moment in the world. As I said, one is unhappy because one’s will is not actualized. The most unhappy man is the one who does not see this as a problem. That says, he who is unhappy knows very well that his will will not be acutualized. I am a fan of a singer and tonight i am going to his concert. That supposes to be a very exciting night. But long before the concert begins, i feel a certain kind of unhappiness which puts off all my desire to listen to the beloved singer. I will still go to the concert, that is for certain. But I know very well that I will not be satisfied right at the moment when i step in the concert hall. Because of that I cannot fully engaged with the concert anymore. While i am following the crowd, humming the wonderful lyrics written, my other-me step aside with my happiness in his hands. My happiness is not stolen, but placed in somewhere else. I know very well but all the same.

The unhappiness in the future is a wonderful privilege for men who can ‘think ahead’. What a beautiful phrase used in the circle of utilitarianism! It’s nothing bad to think ahead for one’s career or the assignment to be done in a month time. But it’s dangerous to think ahead of interiority. Things get a little complicated here. Just imagine, can one think ahead without creating a vague picture of the future in his mind? The picture includes the imaginary reactions of your colleagues, result of your effort put, etc – things that are carefully calculated and pretty concretely imaged in the picture of the future. The picture of the future cannot accurately depict the future. When the future comes, what makes your not happy is not that picture at all. The picture is imagined when t (time) = 0. And in fact the picture has no time, as if the picture will actualize in the same way in any moment. But that of course if wrong. When you ‘arrive’ at the future, there will be a different time. And what crushes you will be another ‘picture’. To be more precise, it’s a picture without an image. It’s not representations (picture) which shoplifts your happiness; it’s something else, something not at all representable in a picture. And when you arrive at the present, the happiness you will recieve will be the happiness of the present. But the problem is: we cannot do away with time. If we can there will be no unhappiness in the past and the future.

It is time which makes one not happy. But it is also time which defines what is a being. How can we live fully in the present, yet not forgetting our vulnerability to our past and future? How can we fully immerse in what we are doing now and not distracted, given that so many people are doing different things and seemingly better things? How can we be happy if we know very well that we will be not happy? Shall we pull ourselves into the wonderful world of entertainment, get away from a critical life, and follow what the world tell us to do?

You can see the unhappiness in the present originates in the realm of animalistic desire, i.e. the immediate want of things. The unhappiness in the past comes from the realm of memory. We are all trained to be a mnemonics; to forget to forget is like the most devilish thing in front of your colleagues. The third unhappiness, which i think is the most terrible, that in the future originates in the problem of interpretation. We have a thirst to interpret things, particularly things which cannot be known. In 19th century this would be called ennui, something very close to melancholy. One of my friend reminds me of this terrible state of mind, that i know very well that i will be not happy. This self-destructive mode of being is not a personality type. It’s crsis of interpretation, of thinking ‘too much’. Dostoevsky writes, ‘to think too much is a disease.’ The melancholic man would rather have that disease and die asap. But the point is: to think too much does not lead you to anywhere, not even a simple predicate.

http://nightmanchester.blogspot.com/

Eng of (a) writing

‘…a person who wishes to write is stopped by a contradiction: in order to write, he must have the talent to write. But gifts, in themselves, are nothing. As long as he has not yet sat down at his table and written a work, the writer is not a writer and does no know if he has the capacity to become one. He has no talent until he has written, but he needs talent in order to write.’ (Maurice Blanchot)

I am closing this site: it can only mean nothing but that myriad of words are about to remove their mask in another time-space.

http://nightmanchester.blogspot.com/

If you care, see you at

next second.

En-insomnia

Nietzsche missed the point about night before daybreak. The most craziest thing happens at night. Last night, in a hostel in Poland, a group of southern French men come back from god knows how many bars, and started drinking again outside the balcony in the hostel.

It was around four in the morning. Next to the balcony are two persons who were also staying in the hostel. The french animals (I have to de-capitalize this country here) were drinking and drinking, like a barrel with an ass whole pierced through its bottom, filling and leaking some yellowish liquid at the same time. One of the two persons was me. I began to hear someone repeating some french phrase aloud, without realizing that they are ruining others’ sleep as well as their own beautiful language. ‘Fuck you!’ I said. My friend, who slept near me, couldn’t bear the noise and went out. I thought she is going to kill the bunch of animals but she went out with a toilet flush. After the pee, she seemed fine and went back to sleep (later she told me she didn’t sleep for the whole night.).

My eyes kept open and my head spinning. The yelling went on. Once I thought they were going to stop and get some sleep, the fucking fat frenchman started pouring out those idiotic phrases again. French cannot be more hateful than that. I don’t want to generalize my hatred against a person onto a country. I know that i only hated that fat excessive Rebalaisian carnival animal. To be specific, I hated his inconsiderate behaviour. Yes, out of drunkeness. The man would not have behave like that had he not drunk so much. I hate not the man but the gestures.

‘I will splash a glass of freezing water over his fucking head and say ‘fuck you’ to him in front of his friends.’ The idea to revenge keeps spinning in my head. Yet the more i spin with the ‘evil’ thought i more difficult i get back to sleep. The next second I thought: ‘I will be as calm as a pond in a Chinese garden regardless of the incomprehensible yelling.’ The thought to kill the man and to seal myself up were both justified and returning in my mind. I realized I will not have the courage to really say ‘fuck you’ and perhaps I will feel regret of being rude to the others. And I also realize the man is not ‘guilty’ of his ‘sin’. But all the same, I still want to say ‘fuck you’ to him, splash water over his head, show justice and superiority to this strange fellow, whom I will never meet again in my life.

I tried to picture a tranquil pond in the garden. But my heart is still very untamed. I couldn’t achieve the Buddhist world as ‘sum yue chi sui’. I want to kill, annihilate, negate, criticize – i am a nihilist. But who is not one? People either negate themselves or the others – they find pleasures in both cases.

It’s daybreak and I can’t go back to sleep. Perhaps the bulky french man has gone back to his room and now enjoying his hangover. The Olympics goes on forever on the tv screen; the front desk staff lying on the couch, two girls has just check-in; the Continental breakfast is about to be served. With me there is Nietzsche’s Daybreak, a bottle of water called Kropla Beskidu, and a pair of heavy and sour eyes. My hatred has subsided into something like residue – the residue you create in a coffee-making machine. All the distilled conffee powder is then wrapped with a piece of filter paper – it is still coffee power but all the intensity has gone.

Perhaps I should make a coffee for myself regardless of the recurring fever and stomach gas (the sleepless night will add more flavour to my stout physique). After all day belongs to the clear-minded; only night can accommodate my rhapsody.

Another five people has checked in. I will move on (out) as well.       

13/8
Kracow

悲情城市

With such room, such weather, such timing, such mood, I watched a film that I will never forget. I admitted that I had projected my depression onto the film. But that will only add more sadness to the world and not reducing its beauty. What will I write? My dreadful state of mind, or the mind of the dreadful, which shown in the film? Of course. How come I forgot it again. Sadness can only be written about when it has not reached the maximum threshold. Let’s drop the pen. I surrender to my heart. It hurts, especially at night.

Okay. Let’s look at my rational side. I am very very very very very happy to have watched the film. And it’s a shame really to have watched it almost 20 years after it was released. I asked a friend from Taiwan about the film and we had a very interesting discussion. We talked about White Terror, the martial law, the hybridity of taiwanese, the history of democracy, the meaning of Chinese culture, and so on…but i can’t go on…

I watched the film on 4/6 and the film was filmed in 1989. The film’s white terror is just the opposite but not very far from the ‘black’ terror happened in the same year. As if everything is meant to put together. Suddenly I thought myself had a glimpse of what human really is – his brutality exploded under dominion, his infinite sadness cannot be articulated with words, his perpetual desire to end his own life. What is humanity? Is it not destructions in disguise. Is it not chaos in order? Is it not soberiety out of the spirit of drunkenness? I just cannot cry. My retarded mind is pitifully rationalized. But yet fully rationalized. As if a machine foresees that he will feel tired one day. Why should we look at the brutality of history? Does it mean there will be none in the future? When brutality stops at the outside, it will revenge on the inside. Everyone will be brutal to him/herself. Mind you the difference between brutal and cruel. We are cruel, but we will become brutal one day. Cruelty is pleasurable violence; but brutality is dreadful; it’s dreadful! It destroys without remorse and no redemption is ever needed.

I thought I could forget my pain by throwing myself into books and writing. Now the machine is trying to forget. The common saying is that: if you try hard to forget, that to-be-forgotten thing will be more vivid in your memory. I can’t say it’s wrong, but i think something more complicated is going on. Perhaps memory becomes dormant at times and active when you have the least expectations. Can I store my heart in the freezer? I got a good freezer in the kitched. It’s 2m x 1m x 1m big and i think people have also been storing their organs inside. Shall we try this? But i need your help. Because I might not want my heart back when i can get rid of all emotions in human beings. Please, 3 years later, 3 years later, put my heart back to my chest. Just plunge it with a garden knife. Use gloves, and wipe the blood with care. I don’t want to be dead when I have my heart again!

Now slash here. No, a bit closer to the left. Yes. Plunge it. I said plunge it!

With such room, such weather, such timing, such mood, he will never forget the film he watched. At the same time, he forgot his feeling about what he watched, he tasted, he heard, he smelled. For that he made the decision. Three years later he will be fine.