pykfung's Xanga

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:05:34 GMT

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.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:06:33 GMT

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/

Monday, August 18, 2008

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:59:56 GMT

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.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:13:07 GMT

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

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:27:06 GMT

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.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:53:05 GMT

走到人生邊上.

What drags me back to this fire squad again? Yes, here is a fire squad, where condemned men get shot by the soldiers. Don't worry, they are blindfolded before the very last minute comes. Which kind of execution do you prefer? The shot? Guillotine? Hanging? Or eletric chair? Do you know that the Americans began to record the execution with a video camera? For whom? For the dead man's parents I guess. As if the execution is too brutal that the parents cannot bear the real sight of it. Do they watch it live? I wonder. It seems the parents are the ones who bear the right to watch their son/daughter being executed. Do I have the right? Are you interested to witness a guillotine if you are back to the 19th century? They all say that no one can move away their eyes from the machine, particularly when the blade is screeching down to split the head and body into two. Hmm, does the man feel or see after his head is cut out? Since most of the sense organs are located in the head, i guess the man can still see the curious crowd, hear the gloomy hoots, taste the motherly soil, and smell the freshness of his own blood. Within a second or so, the consciousness extinguishes. Perhaps pain can be quantified by the duration. But this time, all but the sense of touch is lacking. Just image, the most painful thing is actually painless, because the pain exceeds to a limit which destroys the sense of touch. Perhaps the most painful ends up in the consciousness. The mind! As long as the conscoiousness alive, one cannot run away from pain. Although to exist is akin to exit, there is no exit in pain.

楊絳 has a book called 走到人生邊上. For her death is the margin of life. As if we are walking away from the centre, from day to day, year to year, end up stumble at the edge, and fall over the cliff. In the west, it's a totally different discourse. Death is seen as the 'last stage' of life; death is the very last chapter of a linear narrative. Infant, child, adolenscence, young adult, adult, elderly, death. Can we not see death as something 'at the end'? Can death be part of our everyday life, so that I touch the 'edge of life' as a habit, as an everyday life gesture? We never know how a condemned man thinks. Unless s/he survives in the execution. Not many people did; Dostoevsky is one of them. If a psychologist says he knows everything in other people's mind, does he know what inside the mind of a dead man (who survived)? When experiences are more and more reduced by technology, when imaginations and tolerance are replaced by the triviality of so called wester culture, is there any job easier than being a psychologist? Sounds ridiculous. But it is true that the more naive we get the more psychologists we need. The more we think our problems can be solved, the more we need a guy called psychologist to 'cure' us. Simple doesn't mean being naive. No wonder psychology is a dminant discourse in america. 'Prescription please doctor. I am mentally sick!' When thousands of american soldier cannot speak some years after coming back from Iraq, what a psychologist can do? When someone survive in a earthquake with all his parents buried under the crust, what a psychologist can do? Perhaps one can only be a psychologist of himself. Not an other outside person. Never.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:31:57 GMT

Smoking til the End of the Night

Puff puff - the smoke puffing out between her little pink fat lips. Puff puff - a sort of image formed in the air. Like a face, a car, a high-heel shoe. Puff puff - her hand holding the cigar that she rolled by herself. 'I am penniless, but I smoke all the same.' They are not contradictory; what confuses her is the grammatical structure 'something....but'. How many time is she asked to use conjunctions? Unfortunately, however, on the other hand, on the contrary, on the flip side, etc. 'Enough! I could have been happy!' She thought tears will run off at once but nothing comes out. She laughs, while everyone smiles. She weeps, while everyone depressed. She exists, while everyone enters. Perhaps medication?' Whimsical, as medicine will extend her luxury to feel unhappy. Talk to a psychologist is equally useless. She becomes the mother and the psychologist the child. Every thing he said is expected. Formulations. Every way out she has thought over and over in her sleeplessness. He holds her hands and tries to lead her in a maze, but it is the psychologist himself who gets lost at the end. Poor scientist, tell me the truth if there's one!

She is captured by the crooked smile in the starry night. The sun has eaten most of her body. What remains is a pointedly curved brightness amid the flickering burning gas in the space. Lunar madness. Lunacy has not been that close to the moon. 'Where's my shadow?' Had she found her shadow madness would not have survived. F says in mourning the world becomes empty to the mourner while in melancholy, what is empty is the ego itself. The emptiness sucks everything (yes, everything) into the vacuum. Like kenosis, the self emptying as a form of self-renounciation. Goddess, pray!

She remembers she saw an old woman standing in front of a Jewish synagogue. The maam wanders with some heavy supermarket bags. Sometimes stops and fixes her gaze on something particular in the darkness. Is she finding the moon? Her motions are snail-paced. People like her who maddens the city are popular. Whether it's the city who makes her mad or it's she the city we are not so sure. She, the blossoming woman, sees a certain connection with the maam at the synagogue. An idea rings in her mind that she should talk to her. 'Will you forgive me everything, yes, everything?' She moves not. When she turns her head again, the old woman has disappeared. Perhaps she has found another site for staring the moon. She remains speculative. Puff puff. We never know where the other eyes land. Not even ours. The puff fades before the end of the night. Or is there an end? How can two things without an end arrive at each other?

Monday, May 05, 2008

Mon, 05 May 2008 08:56:13 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JJsddvySV8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7z9BwssnNY

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:23:00 GMT

Melancholy I

'You look happy tonight. What happened?' She looks at me, wondering why I smile a lot tonight. Yea, perhaps that's too much. 'You got something to tell me, don't you?' She studies my face, shakes my shoulders with her unhealthy hands. There is a film begins like this, she says, 'I don't care how people see me, but I will never let people feel happier than me.' And we are here again tonight. Forget repititions, forget Nietzsche's eternal return. That vile little thing called happiness is sweetened at the very present. 'What happened?' She probes into my eyes. Once the question uttered the moment has passed. I know very well I will destroy happiness immediately if I find its origin. Do I hate happiness, or happiness hates me?

Too educated to be uneducated. The difference between innocence and naivety means nothing to me anymore. Hey, love life, even though life does not live. The puzzling sky, the fat moon, the veiled breasts, the knockings of the high-heels, the aura of an intellectual life. That a life is ugly doesn't mean it's not lovely. At least the ugliest thing sometimes could be the sweetest thing for someone else. Perhaps I should also find a cause for my happiness. Further bound my freedom and squeeze out a bitter smile. 'I would rather become an accountant if I had to choose again.' she says. Yes. the job will not allow much self-reflections. The wheel of time. Instead of seeing oneself in her self-directed movie, she will watch a Hollywood film. That vile little thing called pleasure is lurking in the darkness. She sees herself, like what she sees in the mirror. 'Off now, it's time to go.' I was itched when she says 'time'. I looked at my watch, it's 22.07. I left the room, saying anything about my 'happiness'.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:36:50 GMT

三月

三月，天空的險色變了
時晴時陰
時雲時雨

三月，生命走了一半
來作個小結
讓另一半命
找個想法藏身

三月，情感要懶惰
不是叫忙
就是叫悶
沒有節日的那些月
愛情也捲到被裏去
怕找煩，還是愛自己那個啥自我
只有那盤希臘水仙能答話

三月，沒有槳舵
讓雨水隨著天薘上的那支小鐵管
決定方向
讓甚麼國家天災動盪橫禍
提醒那個我
在活著活著

三月，一齊都馬列高尼亞
無病呻吟，為小事找煩
就是要用厭世文字
背起命中
不能承受的輕

三月，濫調陳腔
端中又是另一條悶路
歷史是直是圓
與死亡下棋，還是把屍體作走肉走完不斷重覆的路
是後現代
最棘手的迷思

三月，若叫時間快走
必先狂讀狂寫
狂人白痴戀人陌生
武士魔鬼愚昧天真

三月，Life Does Not Live
在曼城，想香港，懂意大利
厭現在，戀過去，傻想未來
若不能活出生命
只好繼續批判
把虛無
當作成最有價值的按摩椅

即使所有責任都消失
也不要讓精神生活死掉
活吧三月，活吧!