REDUNDANCE OF MEMORIES

POEM / DIARY / ESSAY / FICTION / PAINTING

The Birth of Kitsch / “kitsch!”

2024-01-18 09:35:32 France

Because I also paint and write from time to time, I’ve gradually felt the birth of kitsch. Especially when I repeatedly paint the same content in the same style, the desire to seek fresh expression becomes very strong. A force unwilling to be imprisoned and disciplined by my past ways of expression drags at my weariness. Once I adapt to a certain kind of expression, that expression approaches death. This is a real feeling. Similarly, when I spend a period only watching works by a single director, I can also sense the director’s laziness. Perhaps some would say that’s style, that’s XX aesthetics, but I think only the director himself knows whether he’s being lazy, whether he’s relying on inertial expression.

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To Crush An Ant

How much force does it take to crush an ant? Almost effortless. But why do ants exist? What do they live for? If they don’t live for anything, if living relies merely on some inertia of life, can their existence be equivalent to non-existence? Does their life contain anything richer than life itself? (Of course this is an anthropocentric viewpoint.)

How much force does it take to crush a person? Almost effortless. But why do people exist? What does he live for? If he doesn’t live for anything, if living relies merely on some inertia of life, can his existence be equivalent to non-existence? Does his life contain anything richer than life itself? (Of course this is a nihilistic viewpoint.)

“Must one live for something?” “One must live for something!” “Why must one live for something?” “Not living for anything is already death.” “Why can’t one die?” “Because death means interrupting the interrogation of death.” “Why can’t this questioning stop?” “Perhaps because giving up is easy, while persisting is difficult.” “Why choose difficult things to do?” “Because difficulty provides meaning.” “So is meaning really important?” “Then why do you live?” …

Something was drowning him. He could look up and see that danger he had long premeditated. He thought, how could life continue without facing death? If he didn’t create some difficulties for himself, how could he gain the motivation to live? Fortunately, this predicament needed no external source—he only needed pessimism to pervade, and then he could often discover small pleasures amid the scarcity of meaning. Even if insufficient to dispel the fog, it was enough for him to savor for a while.

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A Murder

Why could he never complete a murder? What made him afraid? Was the realization of purpose the end of meaning or the beginning of meaning? He suddenly lay down, deciding to pause thinking about these simple questions.

He said randomly, “Ah, I’m just a wandering occasionalist. The reason I believe in the contingency of everything is that I try my utmost to be sincere, because only this way can everything around me present itself in its most real form. If I successfully pretended to be someone else, even fooling myself and others, then what rushed toward me would become chaotic and couldn’t possibly be what I really wanted, right?” (But he had never quite figured out the boundary between stubbornness and sincerity, so he often seemed foolish.)

Today someone told him he had always lived in a vacuum, and being able to lie down anywhere like this was already life’s favoritism—not a gift everyone could receive. That person also said he should receive anthropological education, because he actually knew very little about what the real world was. In fact, he was afraid of entering the real world of life. The fortress he had built for himself was so high it even made others a little nauseous. Sometimes he acted on intuition, sometimes he used (imperfect) reason to stop actions he should have taken. If everything was constructed, wasn’t his persistent deconstruction of these institutions another kind of pathology?

One evening, he was also told: there was no such thing as losing control. Losing control was just another normal state different from the average state. Real life had no abnormalities, nor should it have standards. All existence was reasonable. But it seemed he could only truly experience life’s mysteries by encountering enough samples? Thinking this, he lay down again. It seemed safest/most comfortable in his own nest, where all his self-deception and prejudiced dullness were treated with tolerance. Such sincerity was actually without foundation. But how to find one’s position amid diversity? How to shape a non-relativistic self and worldview within tolerance and acceptance? If every word spoken had a listener, we were invaded when speaking. Our selves never seemed to belong to us.

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Why One Can Refuse Suicide

“The world is absurd, life is suffering, existence is meaningless.” “Loneliness is an indispensable feature of human nature, one that is stirred by a contradiction existing between people’s ‘need to find meaning in life’ and their ‘awareness of the nothingness of the human condition.'” —Sartre

Don’t die, he told himself. But why could he not die? He then asked himself in return. The reasons for refusing death initially seemed not to come from within, but rather for the love of everything about himself, to prevent some people’s sadness. He thought that even if one person would shed tears because of his departure, then he shouldn’t die. Unfortunately, long periods of solitude had almost made him forget this point. He began learning to maintain a friendly yet safe distance from everything around him. Why love sometimes became a blade, he didn’t understand. Why in so-called love did he feel himself sacrificing, withering? The more he pretended to be numb and ignorant, the more deeply he knew his own deficiency, then maneuvered between desire and rejection. Dizzy and aimless, he began walking on every street that knew him, but he had never seriously examined the mottled and elongated earth beneath his feet. Like someone making fire in winter snow, only when cold descended would he actively approach the flames, but soon he was burned and returned to the precarious ice surface, beginning to hate that heat.

What he seemed to need was a greenhouse where he could run or lie down without restraint, forgetting day and night, ignoring the changes of seasons. Did some people really only deserve bone-cutting cold? Sometimes he suspected he was truly about to be forgotten by this vast world. On second thought, when had this world ever remembered him? Recently, he wondered if he should cede part of himself. If he was actively disappearing, excreting, or vomiting, then he wouldn’t plunge too quickly into death that was colder than cold itself. But an unlit candle was meaningless. As a translucent gelatinous cylinder, it could let itself drift on the river surface, in the center of a lake, even sink to the ocean floor—but then no one would ever know it was actually a candle.

Walking down the street, he thought of his mother and those people who treated him kindly, and some distant lives with weak connections to himself. So try to light yourself? He said to himself for the first time with purposeless courage. Such dedication was almost facing death. He imagined himself burning. He first saw his arms melting, bringing a glimmer of light to wanderers also deep in darkness. He thought he might imitate that Happy Prince: his eyes were plucked away, his skin peeled off, he lost his crown and rings, his golden clothes were torn away by beggars down to the last fiber, but thus he was truly scattered throughout the world (he would persist in places where he originally could not exist).

For a long time, he stubbornly believed he was about to die (the next second or tomorrow), between suicide and not suicide, between survival and death, melancholically gazing toward that horizon that had never belonged to him. Occupy a temple or burn it down. He habitually indulged in his yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but rarely seriously considered others and their time.

The reasons for refusing death could finally become internal. He realized that the ashes of his burning (if he were lucky) could freely float above the city, in suburban wilderness, even reaching endless highways and narrow forest paths. He had a premonition that he was about to begin real life, dedicating his entire existence by way of burning. At the same time, he began to have expectations—he genuinely longed for his own non-existence. Occasionally thinking of this, he felt a feather-light, subtle satisfaction.

Thus, he realized he shouldn’t die. In the unpeopled wilderness, he finally saw the first Other.

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The Unjust Trial/Warrantless Sadness

To resist the pain that had once been fulfilling and was again hollow, he was forced to throw himself into a kind of closure. To refuse sadness, he refused the birth of all emotions, at the cost of losing normal associative and perceptual abilities. In numbness, hypocritical, false calm briefly appeared. He tried his best to escape, awkwardly, inappropriately, like a stray dog. He floated on the path away from memory. Melancholy emerged incessantly, hesitating in the dam, preparing for the next deluge.

What was fairness? Would it be fair if everyone had to possess the same degree of melancholy? One winter evening, he was told that everyone’s platelet coagulation function was different, as was the speed at which sadness dissipated (blaming healthier bodies was ridiculous, and his thousands of counter-questions became even more groundless at that moment). The restaurant’s lights flowed murkily. He saw his interlocutor’s mouth opening and closing, looking sympathetically toward the child curled up in his heart. Yes, he had to accept this unjust trial.

Munch painted overlooking the Oslo fjord from Ekeberg Hill (The Scream). One evening, Munch was walking along the coastal path with two friends when he said, “I stopped, trembling with anxiety—I felt as though a vast scream passed through nature.” In 1903, when facing his self-portrait, he said, “They will not understand that these paintings were created in sincerity and pain, they are the work of sleepless nights, they consumed my blood and wore down my nerves.”

So, for such a fragile soul, allowing those memories that tormented him to continue existing might be his only way out, and this had nothing to do with any moral or ethical justice. Because he had to survive, he could only accept that overflowing (perhaps gradually fading) melancholy and the inevitable incompleteness of the self as non-existence. He still needed to feel. No tree would forbid the scattering of its leaves, so what reason did he have to prevent the invasion of sadness—if they didn’t grow vigorously, they couldn’t wither.

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Concern and Domination/On Atmosphere

What needs to be dominated? What needs to be dominated? To conquer or be conquered? To fall into a trap, or does the trap unreflectively project into our abyss? If things are constantly being born, are they also constantly dying? If we so desire to grow, why fear loss? Words wither and peel like flowers in a vase, leaving their flesh. After being secreted by the subject, freed from brooding silence, once abandoned, they no longer belong anywhere. They surge outward, offering their feeble meaning under the threat of death.

Thus domination is a paradox. If we try to dominate a rushing river, our so-called discipline is filled with irresistible failure from the start. Then how to act? Is action still necessary? In what posture are unstoppable life and death willing to accept gifts from elsewhere? In what way is purposeless living willing to briefly accept the arrival of meaning? Only in nothingness, in those unconscious realms that exist nowhere.

A voice says to those people: go dominate elsewhere, spare me, such a weak and cowardly person. I don’t need your praise or doubt that carries greater expectations for me. What’s needed is only a fragrance, a scent belonging to childhood. Only in reminiscence does one perceive the present, but the present is quickly lost. Fortunately, waiting is possible. A naive intention pushes our gaze forward, but only forward.

Protention and retention unfold in every moment. Water spilled on the table—every inch penetrates into the depths of the wooden table, while other parts drip where no one pays attention. Too little can be possessed, but existing things are so abundant: the warmth of a wooden table, the overturning of a water cup, the master’s flustered expression… Everything unspoken reveals in an instant a kind of angry yellow, or other colors.

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The Mask of Narrative/The Conditional Confession

He carefully selected his way of speaking, because this concerned hypotheses about love and the masquerade of power. He could unconditionally become himself, but could not unconditionally become the other in others’ eyes.

“You don’t have to force a smile / smile when you don’t want to / you’ve done this too much already / leave it to me / you can turn your back on everyone / turn your back on me right beside you / let your expression rest / whether what emerges is tears / a blank space / or no change at all / keep what should be kept / give it to those who like shoulds / being you is enough / I’ll sit down and wait for you / and not look at you for long”

Whenever he thought of this poem, he could feel a distant yet enormous comfort: so he had always possessed the freedom not to smile. When a rugged person finally reconciles with himself, he simultaneously acknowledges most of the absurd. He thought the world should be composed of equal souls, rather than men and women, old and young, lawyers and thieves, teachers and students… These hasty divisions served only to bring misunderstanding to understanding. But to earn the qualification for silence, he had to speak incessantly.

He saw her torn, misshapen fingernails. Each one had been hammered into chaos by her little hammer, with fragmented continents revealing bluish-purple patterns.

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Unquestionable/ Worth to be Trash

2022-05-11 05:44:10

During adolescence, he had to admit he was trash, a dispensable piece of waste paper in the world. But fortunately, he made peace early with his own stupidity, because to some extent, he felt his trash nature was the most unquestionable thing about himself. It was almost tolerance and dependence on his own defects that led to the relative stability of his spiritual world.

“I am nobody, I am an insignificant boring creature.”

He would say this to himself from time to time. The more he repeated such sentences, the more he felt an indescribable sacred power from them. Since he was nothing, it was perfectly normal for others to hurt, mock, despise, and ridicule him, while others’ praise, care, protection, and comfort should all be treated as fate’s favoritism. A trash person’s life seemed unworthy of serious treatment, and no one had to give him a satisfactory promise. But if his posture was humble enough, then stinginess, retreat, fear, and rejection all needed to be accepted, because these seemingly negative events further confirmed his emptiness and weakness. Perhaps the frail heart and body were the real him. Some people strengthened their fantasies about themselves by gaining power, while he was practicing repeatedly confirming his real existence by directly facing his own brokenness. Paradoxically, only he could deny his own value—only he could. All other discipline and oppression seemed either insignificant or utterly detestable to him. Why should he be ruled? There was no logic to it.

This might sound somewhat ridiculous. But what is absolutely beautiful? What kind of women and men are beautiful? Is it possible that the more beautiful something is, the more vulgar it becomes, the less worth mentioning, because they all crave approaching the ideal form of beauty as aimlessly as flies? Sadly, at best they can only be joyless, clumsy imitations of beauty. By approaching beauty and claiming to be beautiful, they arrogantly deny beauty itself. Sometimes he would think that only the real is beautiful, and this beauty can only come from everything mundane. Perhaps for this reason, he gradually became accustomed to clinging to his deficiencies in his ordinary private world, repeatedly stretching his damp, dark green moss-like time. Was this misanthropy? He felt curious. But what kind of expectations should one have anyway? Is it possible that when he calmly accepts those nauseating uglinesses, he is actually sincerely loving this world and his own life?

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Time Problem/ Un-Morphology

2022-04-24 17:07:37

Why did her time pass so densely, with everything in life tangled together? Her preferences, tastes, and sensibilities remained similar to childhood. Had childhood become prematurely decayed, or had she always been nostalgic for childhood and refused to leave? She couldn’t know. Looking through her photos from childhood to adulthood, almost only her height had changed—her gaze, clothing, even hairstyle hadn’t changed much. The writers, painters, and filmmakers she liked—those cruel, rough, lustful, pure, noble ones—she swallowed them all without distinction. Because she made no distinctions, they were all preserved together—they were distant from morality, unrelated to beauty or ugliness, just existing so ordinarily and peacefully. But when did her time stop? Or had her time always been extending, with all the past sedimenting into this single urgent present? This was a non-linear time. She didn’t want to move forward, nor did she feel it necessary to move forward. She drifted in her own river, treating ten years as one year or one day. She watched boring TV dramas over and over because there was familiar time in them. Perhaps she was always seeking a kind of nostalgia, a wordless belonging distant from time. Sometimes she would think, perhaps modern time was only for production and consumption, to give those products on assembly lines an expiration date. But if things were oriented toward elimination from the beginning of production, wouldn’t that be too negative and sad? Ten years, two years, one year, or two months—these times were unrelated to the soul, unrelated to perception.

She cherished everything she had, including those imperfect parts, so in her fantasies, she felt she could probably stop living at any moment and was always prepared to be destroyed in the next second. She would seriously remember those she loved in the minute before her heart stopped beating, leaving them with full gratitude. They had already given her too much kindness and pure care. When she thought about how dangerously she had persisted, almost approaching the disappearance of subjectivity, then every happiness she could have now was her lucky gain. And because of her complete freedom, everything she encountered could happen.

Why did she consider death when she was happiest? In some moments, she was satisfied to the point where she could almost give up everything, because she sincerely wanted time to stop then. What could fill the void brought by continuing forward minute by minute? Could only void fill void? If she was willing to move forward after giving up destinations, did that mean every step was from the most authentic will, behavior that flowed out without any coercion? If she lived this way, then every day’s life was from will, not responsibility. Life bearing responsibility was hard. She knew her own timidity, so she appeared carefree. But the frequent appearance of randomness was exactly what she needed to accept calmly in this behavioral pattern. Completely simply because she loved this world, she was willing to live one more day, then another day. Sometimes the will was slightly stronger, sometimes slightly weaker. If there were no death prohibition or death sentence, then she thought she was truly responsible for herself, because she always possessed freedom of action (perhaps she equally missed her own courage).

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“If I Fell Asleep on a Red Airplane About to Crash”

2022-04-10 22:15:05

“We met on a cheap night. After the opening lines, she said ‘tonight you’re lucky.'”

Two stumbling drunks like one lame person. Walking down the street normally, he sometimes actually wanted to lie directly on the ground; this time walking with her, he still wanted to do that in some moments. This black road seemed endless, but logically it should end soon. He didn’t understand why they had to keep walking, letting two legs alternately complete the body’s slow displacement. He wanted to try if he could walk with just one leg, so he started hopping on one foot while laughing and cursing himself in his mind for being sick. Why couldn’t people have just one leg? Why couldn’t they fall down in place when so tired, or at least sit down? Did a moment’s rest mean the beginning and end of the game? Passing a river, he wondered why he couldn’t be a fish, breathing in the river during the day and gasping at the riverbed at night? Could this murky canal mercilessly wash him into another embankment? But what would be there? Almost the same life, constantly blowing bubbles, diving deeper and deeper, feeling the body’s struggle and occasional salvation under pressure changes.

They had known each other for less than three hours, with nothing to chat about, and of course no need for conversation (past or present). She quickened her pace to walk ahead of him, suddenly starting to spin in circles with light steps, her face bearing totems gifted by the night’s dim yellow lights, constantly changing in the interplay of light and shadow. He couldn’t see her face clearly and temporarily had no extra fantasies, because following his ridiculous inertia, he thought of other questions: Why couldn’t people have just one hand? Why couldn’t people have just one eye? Thinking this, he alternately opened and closed his left and right eyes, suddenly discovering that objects had double images—this was a visual deviation that prevented ancient astronomers from accurately estimating distances in cosmic space. Oh, he realized this problem was from a boring philosophy class; that middle-aged female professor of his was really stupid; why couldn’t some people know how stupid they were?… He began thinking distractedly. She continued about two meters ahead of him, persistently jumping and spinning, possibly to attract his attention; most likely, she was also thinking about those boring little things.

Finally they reached their destination. He wondered whether he should carefully examine her face. Would looking at her seriously be disrespectful? If their intersection was only for that too-simple thing, would such examination seem superfluous? Fortunately, she was also used to not looking at him. Soon, they had no time to think about these things.

(If lucky, some people can become silent companions, spreading out in the void of self; unfortunately, many are just travelers on a corridor, hitching a ride, quickly reaching their stop.)

(If I fell asleep on a red airplane about to crash: when people die unconsciously in sleep, is it fortunate or unfortunate? Is it completely avoiding the perception of pain, or missing something more important?)

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Blanchot’s Reader/The Fear

2022-04-12 21:02:08

The danger lies in acknowledging one’s own deficiency.

Becoming a qualified reader of Blanchot won’t be easy. First, one needs some patience and stubborn choice, because academic education won’t cultivate readers for Blanchot—some theoretical texts aren’t powerful enough. What’s needed is absolute life, a kind of experiencing life to the fullest in daily existence until the subject is invaded and occupied by surroundings. Second, one needs to have felt the dissolution of subjectivity as similarly/intensely as Blanchot, then fortunately retrieved the fragments of self to reassemble into a new person, letting this new person wander/float/defer freely between existence and non-existence. Finally, courage is needed—purposeless courage (courage’s courage)—because when they admit to being deeply moved by words, they simultaneously become more profoundly aware of their own deficiency and dissatisfaction. Eventually, this consciousness grows stronger and stronger, and they have no choice but to fall back into danger.

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Honest Deconstruction

2022-06-05 02:51:45

He made a twisted motion, knowing this motion would be translated by others as madness, hoping people would recognize it;

She made a twisted motion, knowing this motion would be translated by others as seduction, not hoping people would recognize it.

What is bodily beauty? Is it arranged organs piled into human flesh? Is it tight skin, upturned eye corners, downturned mouth corners, clean toes, firm forearms, slender finger joints, or something else? Top and bottom, all mixed up. Do these follow some pattern? Can this withered flesh be used? Inside those imposing, swaggering bodies are just small intestines, large intestines, blue blood vessels, some misplaced bones. Everything is in there, even urine and feces. What pride can those smug faces claim?