23. Fingerprints

Fingerprints started to be officially used as a way of identifying people exactly 150 years ago today. I have often meditated on what people have in common and what is unique to each of them.

Towards the end of the 50s, my mother had already started her long quest that would lead decades later to her deep involvement in alternative medicines, new age practices, cults, and concerns over invasions by extraterrestrials.

The beginning of that long journey was with vegetarianism, and it often translated itself by the insertion of yogurt into the lunchbox I brought to school. Yogurt, in those days, wasn’t sold in supermarkets. No one in the suburb where we lived had ever heard about it.

I’m in primary school and in the large cafeteria where we all eat, I must put the warm liquefied yogurt on the table that I share with the other children from my group.

Rotten milk, vomit were among the names that flew around me as I tried to eat. The children would even cross the entire room to come and see how disgusting my lunch was, calling more classmates over to make sure I would really feel uncomfortable. And hate my mother even more for doing this to me.

That’s the moment when I knew I had a selfhood, a oneness that distinguished me completely from others.

After lunch, we all went outside to play in the schoolyard. The kids had skipping ropes and they would do elaborate tricks, jumping as two long colored ropes drew circles in the air without ever touching.

I had never seen a skipping rope before attending school. It was a sort of magical game that everyone knew about, except me. Again, it confirmed my sense of uniqueness.

I didn’t know where they had learned these tricks. Where was I when it had happened? When the instructions on how to jump had been given - the rope under the feet, then over the head, turning so fast?

I remember, little one. I was sick, at Ste-Justine’s Hospital for children. In a room with another girl, Helene.

Helene, who had suffered from polio at a young age, had her entire body in a long silver cylinder, an artificial lung. Only her head could be seen, her hair and face sticking out, turned towards me as we made conversation.

She was much older than I was, how old? She must have been 11 or 12. She couldn’t recall a time when she hadn't been in that metallic tube.

She would ask me to peek at the window and describe to her what I saw. Were there trees? What did they look like? And cars? How big were they? Did they go fast? What was their color? And the people inside, how many? Could I see how they were dressed?

I think I was 4 or 5, it isn’t clear in my mind. I lived with Helene everyday - for weeks or months, I can’t remember.

Helene was my friend. Never upset. Always soft spoken. Very talkative. She never even seemed to realize I couldn't understand everything she said.

I felt an extreme responsibility towards her. A descriptive one because it was my job to narrate; my duty to render the world as concretely as possible so she could picture it in that head of hers, the only part of her body visible and able to move.

I felt so frustrated not to have all the needed words to properly talk of the sky, the clouds, the plants. I knew I was limited, incompetent, that I lacked the vocabulary Helene would have deserved.

I would speak slowly, trying to notice details, searching in my mind for the names I could give to the things I saw.

It was terribly difficult, my sweet one. I wasn’t sufficiently prepared. I felt ashamed. But I did try, with scarce mental resources, to comply with her wishes. You see, I couldn’t use comparisons. Helene had no points of reference besides the steel apparatus that surrounded her.

I had to be careful how I would describe. The wrong expression and Helene’s desire to know more would quickly skid in all directions while she tried to shape coherent images in her mind. And I would find myself unable to follow her in the mysterious ways she used to build her impressions of the world.

Oh, sweet one, it was so complicated.

Helene had only me. Neither of us had visitors. Her, because she had been in the hospital for so long, people had forgotten her. Me, because my family lived out of town.

I had purpura, a blood disease, hemorrhagic, always in danger of endless internal bleeding if I fell or hit myself (explaining why I had never been offered a skipping rope, I guess).

Putting me next to Helene who couldn’t go anywhere, nurses and doctors had made sure I wouldn’t have any accidents or be tempted to run, play, climb with others.

So here we were, Helene and me, day after day, constructing deficient verbal portraits of the streets, landscape, events. Me, suffering from my inability to be limpid, precise, logical, organized in my depictions. Helen, avid of constantly more accurate descriptions. I was terribly aware of my shortcomings. Profoundly frustrated. Damned, I didn’t even know how to read. And I loved Helene so.

One morning, little one, the sound of a mop being hit against furniture woke me up. It was very early, hardly any light around. There was an old man in the room, pushing a gray bucket, spreading soapy water on the floor, cleaning… where Helen’s artificial lung should have been.

She was gone, baby. Totally gone.

I only remember the fear, overwhelming, that took me from head to toe, emptying in its trajectory my entire bowels. I sank so fast, deep into the earth’s dark entrails. It was horrible.

Maybe to help me recover, maybe to keep me company, I was given a large doll. She was as tall as I was. I mean we were truly the exact same size. But where I was angular and skinny, the doll was plump. Her hair was golden, shiny and long; mine was black, short and uncombed. My eyes were brown, hers were blue. I named her, of course, Helene.

The doll shared my bed. I would practice all day long trying to look like her (since I still wasn’t allowed to play outside the room). The first thing to do was to be immobile, parallel to her. I had it to perfection.

As a matter of fact, whenever the doctors made their rounds and came to examine me, they would get it wrong and put their stethoscope on the doll. I thought I was so funny, giggling, hidden under my blankets while they thought Helene was the patient.

When the time came, one day, for my parents to take me back home, where I would still have to remain in bed for months, I asked them not to forget to take Helene with us.

I yelled. I yelled and I yelled, out of my mind, when I realized they hadn’t done so.

My mother, impatient with my hysterical fit, shouted back that there was no doll. She lied, sweetheart. Oh, she lied. I still know it today, old like I am, with all I’ve seen on this planet. That my mother lied. And I immediately planted a large sharp symbolic stick into my heart to make it hurt forever, to never forget my rage.

You may think this is a childish story about a lost toy. About a capricious daughter going nuts on account of a puerile fantasy. Maybe it is. I don’t know how to reply.

To summarize, I ended up starting school late, ignorant about rope skipping, equipped with strange looking nutrients in my lunchbox. Altogether, it’s not such a tragedy.

But neither of the two Helenes of my life had had per se fingerprints. Looking back, that’s where the problem may have been: There’s no way I can formally have either of them identified.

Ciao, Laolao

22. Perpetual Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, who taught computer science at Carnegie Mellon, died yesterday.

To date, more than 3 million people have watched his video on YouTube "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

He dedicated it to his children.

I watched it thinking of you, my little ones. Pausch was an accomplished professor, a creator, an excellent speaker. He spent his professional life studying how humans interact with computers. He was interested in virtual reality, initiating projects that will survive him. His legacy can be said impressive.

What I’m leaving you with is definitely different. Should I be sorry? I have none of Pausch’s achievements or fame, but I share with him a desire to voice. His was about how to succeed. Mine is about how not to fail.

Pausch had real pride in his itinerary. It was an exceptional one, I’ll admit. Mine for sure is devious, made of a record-breaking amount of mistakes. I truly wish it could be otherwise. We’ll have to make-do with what we have.

But you might be surprised: Your Laolao, like Pausch, is also interested in how we interact with computers.

To study the phenomenon, I do not use science, programming languages, gadgets, hardware, cables. I use my memory and its holes, and travel back in time. Through these interstices, as an example, I can revisit my grand-mother when she would tell me to go outside, early in the morning, to help my grand-father bring into the house logs for the woodstove. The first fascinating ‘machine’ I came across. A brilliant one, filled with fire. So dynamic, in constant motion, with a magnificent scent, that of a burning intensity filling the room. The sound too, ardent, explosive, always deep in my ears.

A machine I could play with. My grand-parents, despite my young age, allowed me to feed it, to enliven it. I was master of the incendiary, yes, like an agitator. Ready to deal with the passions and anger of the inferno. All day long. My childhood ablaze, sitting next to the woodstove, adding twigs or paper to make sure the colors, incandescent red, orange, yellow, would not abandon me. Guardian of an immense power, fiery; torrid flames enkindling my pride.

That relationship to the woodstove is similar to the one I have today to my laptop.

As I lift the cover to peek inside a bright world in continual change, I see how pixels are, them too, flammable. Combustible. Fueled by materials highly consumable. And I remain spellbound by the feverish heat, the bodily brilliance of the screen igniting thoughts and emotions twirling until they become ashes. Settling their incinerated flakes, floating colonies of letters, matter pulverized - the residues that sentences are made of after the eruptions of trillions of tiny storage dots against our spirit. Intensity data invariably requiring more memory. High resolution blasts shining, sparkling, and then calming down, becoming the sediment of sharper images to hold on to.

I have traveled far, baby. Persistently after heat and light. Finding them in intricate mazes. In the labyrinths - tunnels and networks that enmesh the topology of all our searches.

What we now do online, I have always done it in a constellation of feelings about what I can’t find. The chaos is not new. The disorganization of information has consistently been around. The pathways and connections have always been an entangled assemblage of despotic configurations. Hard to sort out using non-current verb tenses.

And we add logs, and twigs, even detritus, to keep it all alive, even when we get scorched. Every time we write, access a page, wiki, blog, link, record, film, stream, down/upload, view, listen, draw, delete, bookmark, tag, we program, in an object-and-subject-oriented way, the paradigm of combustion. Burning all we are to arrive faster at the inflections of our grammatical souls – where we can bend away from alignment and simply send out waves. A transfer of energy, a perpetual last lecture like a gift to the virtual atoms and molecules of our collective egos. The cooling charcoal text left behind like a soft carpet to mark footsteps.

It doesn't mean though we know how to read.

Laolao

21. Smog motif

Heavy, hot smog covering the city. A ghost city. We all feel under Martial Law.

I’m glad you’ll be in France during August.

I’ll stay here. As an act of duty, I guess. So to witness history in the making.

The police knocked on my door yesterday. They checked my papers and gave me a sound advice: Never to open my door to strangers…

The college where I work will be closed for the Olympics. I’ll spend those two weeks at home. Almost all colleagues and friends will be gone.

I’ll stock food and cigarettes. I might go out once in a while to count the number of security vehicles circling the compound where I live. It’s located half way between the central government buildings and some of the sites where Olympic events will be held. I feel truly in the way.

I didn’t buy any tickets when the Olympics were held in Montreal in 1976. And I haven’t bought any for those of Beijing. I will have lived twice in a host city without ever attending one of the sports events.

I’ll be honest, dear one, I don’t remember a lot about the summer of 76. I have flashes. Of a terribly dirty worn-out sofa-bed in a small room on St-Urbain street. There were so many cockroaches there that I slept with the lights on. The building housed junkies, prostitutes, old, lonely people. You could hear fights or parties, sometimes both at the same time and at the same place, late into the night through the paper-thin walls.

As furniture, also a small wooden table and one chair. On the table, there was my only book. I can still see it with clarity, the design on the cover, the lettering: L’Homme approximatif by Tristan Tzara. I guess I must have stared at it often and for long periods of time, evening after evening, with little else to do.

I was pregnant. Twenty-one years old. And in a way, fresh out of jail.

Oh, I didn’t spend much time there, just a few hours. But enough to deeply scare me. I heard for a long time afterward in my mind the sound made by the electronic doors being shut behind me with a loud metallic bang as I was escorted to a cell.

I used to live in a large apartment on Sherbrooke street with a group of drag-queens. I was the only “true” girl in the gang. They made a living doing lip singing shows in a couple of sordid bars downtown, dressed as Marilyn Monroe or Liza Minnelli. And to make ends meet at the end of the month, they would also “do the parks”… In particular, the Parc Lafontaine. That’s what attracted the police. And we all got arrested as the cops retraced their whereabouts back to the flat.

I felt happy with the drag queens, little one. They were good friends. The best I had ever had.

Kindness and a sweet, tender despair. Plus lots of witty laughter. Their tongues were sharp, reply was an easy game for them. They knew, with very few, but well-chosen words, how to defend themselves. They were quick. With an edge of snappy sarcasm that impressed me so.

They seemed fearless, never missing a chance to answer back whenever people insulted them. They had that kind of intelligence, made of speed and boldness, taking their adversaries for a ride with a twist of the mind.

I was hoping to become like them, proud and brisk. Able to face and defeat the world with only caustic remarks. I loved them for that. They were teachers.

As for the tender despair, in the privacy of our home, they held hands. Playing at being lady-like, doing each others' hair or toe nails, borrowing and lending clothes, fake jewelry, or wigs. Imagining costumes for a new show. Or practicing the manners and expressions of famous actresses. They took care of each other. Very protective.

I was a bit like their younger sister. They had this project of making a woman out of me. Because they knew, and I didn’t. They had closely studied feminineness. I hadn’t.

So I would let them buy me high-heel shoes, or drape me in rows of plastic pearls. They glued false eyelashes to my face and chose the right lipstick color for my skin. They would suggest ways to walk or sit. Different kinds of smiles for different occasions. They even taught me how to dance.

This is how we spent our time. Discussing how women should be.

I did not have faith in their views about gender-based behavior. But I needed the caring. And most of all, the simple fun of togetherness. I enjoyed every minute I’ve spent with them. How long? A little more than a year until we got disbanded and headed each our own way.

My way wasn’t far. I had no place to go. I was working as a part-time waitress. And had no plans.

One day I noticed a young woman entering the restaurant with a baby in a carriage. People got up, opened the door, helped her find a seat. And I thought she represented respectability. I decided on the spot to have that for myself. I wanted respect.

And a reason to live.

This is how, alone, I had my first child. Spending the summer of the Montreal Olympics hidden in a cheap room, watching my belly grow. Reading the only book I could afford. All my money, every week, invested in baby stuff. Buying a baby spoon here, there a bib, later, a pacifier or a tiny cotton hat. Little by little, building my ‘respectable’ future.

I kept all these objects in a cardboard box. Everyday I took them out and laid them in a row on the sofa-bed just to contemplate how new, clean, neat these little things were, how they spelled my new status, how they carried, one by one, the name I would soon have, that of mother. Weeks and months went by like that. Transferring all my aspirations on baby booties and a teddy bear.

A book, baby articles to stare at. No idea whatsoever that the Olympics were happening.

Today, I'm well aware they’ll be staged in two weeks. The city looks deserted following the measures: shutting down much of the factories, sending migrant workers back home, banning half the cars off the streets. But to no avail. The pollution remains. People stay indoors, afraid. Too many security officers. Surface to air missiles. An entire city, nervous, paranoid, unsure of itself at the dawn of an era full of unknown, hoping to impress, dreaming also of respectability as it stares at its rows of never-used ultra-modern buildings. But deep down petrified. Nightmares of failures, rejection, inaptitude, and misunderstandings. Moving quite awkwardly in the darkness of the smog. Probably as much as I once did, striving to transcend my gloomy surroundings on the wings of colossal expectations.

Love, Laolao

20. Franklin’s basket

Benjamin Franklin, man of culture, science, political beast, diplomat, writer, inventor, one of the Founding Fathers of the USA, wrote in June 1745 in a letter titled Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress:

The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

Just try to image the basket…

I laughed so hard when I read that. Men are unbelievable.

So, according to Franklin, all your Laolao would have to do is to wear a basket covering her head all the way to her waist to seduce and please a young man. Hilarious. I’m picturing the scene.

How old was Franklin when he thought that one up? Lets see… Almost 40. I’m intrigued: Did he consider himself old or young at the time? Did he use for women the same criteria as the ones he applied to himself when selecting their age epithet?

I live in a country where 30 is considered old. Single women of that age are an abnormality, socially rejected, impaired, a shame.

Right after college, graduates expect a senior position in a corporation. To wait 10 or 20 years for experience to develop is perceived as a non-sense.

There’s no discourse on beauty, it’s all about cuteness.

I wonder, when I stand in front of my students, what they think. I’m still teaching at an age where women, in China, have already retired.

You see, sweetheart, I find my students very conventional. They abhor risks. They’re very much into group-think. They repeat in the same chorus traditional views about every topic one can think of. They dislike originality, signs of individuality. They never want to stand out. They express opinions always in line with what’s socially acceptable. They never dare present an idea of their own. No imagination or interest beyond price tags and brand names. Their values are always within the frame of the expected. They take no initiatives, always happy with the minimum and surfaces.

So, I gather, they must think, looking at me or other lecturers, that growing old involves reading unusual stuff, having passions, getting out of line when discussing, coming up with ideas that disturb standards. Being bothersome because of questions asked, causing trouble with a critical approach and noisy arguments. Wasting time trying new stuff. Being disruptive through efforts to trigger change. Never happy the way things are.

My students must think that growing old corresponds to being curious, inventive. Even provocative. A sort of eccentricity, carelessness about established norms. They must surely think, as an example, that getting involved in a project for other purposes than making money is a sign of senility. Having fun with concepts, theories, possibilities are symptoms of an aging mind, shopping’s much better. Fascination with differences are side-effects of mental deterioration. A taste for experimentation, a definite mental handicap brought about advanced age and its disharmonious functioning.

That’s probably why I often feel I’m not reaching my students. I can’t wake them up. They’re probably telling themselves between naps that they don’t want to grow old. They must find the behavior I’m suggesting preposterous, besides too tiring and unsafe.

I haven’t yet found a way to convince them – if they’re so worried about maturity - that all they would really need when going to bed is a good, sturdy basket. But during the day, they should walk around.

Laolao

19. Picasso’s bull

How long, how far should we polish a text? What’s the moment when we lose touch with the reality we tried to apprehend? As one may want his or her writing more elegant, simpler, tighter, at which stage of the re-writing is the connection lost?

Picasso created a series of 11 lithographs in 1945, titled "Bull." Step by step, through each plate, steadily analyzing the elements, Picasso purifies the drawing to its most essential representation. From realism to abstraction.

Picasso starts by dissecting the bull in search of its structure, meaning the musculature and the bones. Then, he outlines each part into simplified geometrical forms. At this point, the bull is still recognizable. Picasso continues, but this time, he alters the proportions. Some he shrinks, others he enlarges. He erases parts, extends a few ones. As a consequence, a new balance appears, a creative relationship among the lines. But to say the truth, little one, we don’t see the bull anymore.

After plate V, we have the presentiment it’s an animal, but a bull? No.

The drawings remain of interest, but if the goal is to convey the message of a bull, there is indeed a place in the series of plates where that message disappears, replaced by a new one, that portrayed by modern art, or cubism, or aesthetic theories.

But it’s no longer about the bull.

Is it possible that art starts after Picasso’s fourth plate? When the bull vanishes, leaving the entire place to Picasso’s vision. The plates V to XI could therefore solely be about Picasso, not his subject.

The problem exists with writing. As well as with life.

How much should I edit my thoughts, my feelings? How far should I go, as I examine and reconfigure how I reacted throughout the day? As I displace emotions and comments into a new (writable) equilibrium? As I counterbalance perceptions to match what I remember of facts and events? As I retell myself my daily stories, summarizing them into what I believe is their essence?

I flatten some aspects, reconstruct others, perhaps even shift the focus as I try to emphasize a particular idea. I distort the picture of the history I want to record so to arrive at an image that would reveal the basic traits that I've envisioned for it. With each intervention, I alter the chronology, even the script. I modify conversations. The roles. The nature of the characters. The sequence and amplitude of their gestures.

If I repeat the process often enough, there’s a moment, a place, where my own bull is eclipsed by the process itself.

That’s exactly where I’m no longer telling you, my dear, about what I've encountered, heard, saw, experienced. I’m simply capturing the tenuous line of transubstantiation.

Possibly, that’s also where I’ve stopped telling, period, doing something else instead.

And by the same occasion, I’ve lost sight of you. You are no longer the reader. The bull I meant to share with you is gone. I’ve crossed into another dimension where the reader is impersonal. Also an abstraction, reduced to its essence.

It is always, you must believe me, a very difficult choice. I’ve never solved that divide.

Derrida spoke of langue and parole. The written, the spoken. Where do I stand? Is there a difference that won’t collapse? If so, what should I choose? Should I sacrifice you? Can I live with your absence? Can the writing have a level of meaning more important than the one given by your mind?

I repunctuate, add or delete commas, question hyphens, ellipses, watch out for typos, tickle syntax, constantly wondering whether thoughts should be quoted verbatim, raw, in the act. If not, how much paraphrasing of my own impressions should I allow? Can I transcribe diction? To what extent? What if an emoticon is more adequate than a word? What would a copy/paste from my mind to the screen look like? What is it to become an architect of style like Picasso was for the bull?

Would I lose the bull forever and does it matter?

And will you still be there, my loved one, at the end of that transfigured line? Will you follow it? Will you find me in it?

I never know what is important: The bull itself, its stature, strength, the very shapes that give it power? Or a carefully planned abstract contour that would tell of my most inner fiction born an eternity ago from the project of a bull?

And what is it that you need, sweet one? If only I knew.

Picasso said: "A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions."

One moment, you see me clumsily attempt to draw a bull. At another, you look at me taking it apart, ripping its sense. Rewriting its nature until unidentifiable, unsure about what to call what is left to see.

How dangerous is this for both of us? If only I knew.

Love, Laolao

18. Tranquility Base

A quick word on this extremely hot Monday afternoon, July 21 2008. Already 39 years since Neil A. Armstrong walked on the moon.

What a beautiful way it was for me to be 16 years old. The most radiant moment of that year. Perhaps even the most exciting time of my entire adolescence.

I knew I was making history, watching amazing images. I had opened my ears, my eyes, my memory as deep, as wide as humanly possible to take them all in: The sounds, the voices, the comments, the explanations, the black and white shapes moving on the surface of the moon. I knew I was part of my time. Answering ‘present’ with all my strength to the call of awareness.

These had been tough years for me. I had been kicked out of high-school. Had ran away for home, drifted into a hippy commune mainly populated by American draft-dodgers who had crossed the border to escape the Vietnam war. Had been sent to the loony bin for being a famished minor weaving leather belts on the street and also, maybe, for listening too much to the blues. And had the most striking and gigantic silk-screen poster of Che Guevara above my mattress directly resting on the floor.

A resourceful person, besides making belts, I did also thread most of the chickpeas necklaces sold in psychedelic record stores downtown. At the commune, not much to eat of course, but a huge bowl in the middle of the living room filled with all the pills and drugs one can imagine.

I must say my family tried hard to understand. They were basically good to me. Against a bag of oranges one day, they had made me promise to accept help. I kept the appointment. A woman therapist to whom I spoke 10 minutes before my mother, puffy red with tears, barged into her office, scandalized by the fact my father had referred me to one of his mistresses. As the two women got at each other’s throat, again I ran away. Glad to have gotten fruits out of the rotten deal.

A confusing era. Directionless. Making my way nowhere, but always on the move. Knowing mainly what I didn’t want, but without a clue about my desires. Sad days and nights, on the eve of the death of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. We were sinking so fast, willingly, so conscious of doing so. Accelerating the trip downward with all our might. A race to the end. Here and there, people dropping out of sight. Overdoses, suicides, accidents on the insipid tunes of Donovan and of Iron Butterfly.

I wore at all times a long black embroidered Mexican poncho that I could also use as a blanket. I had such a high sense of practicality.

What happened to it? Can’t remember.

It is against that background - the lusterless, depleted red and yellow flowers of my poncho - that Apollo 11 flew out of here.

I was so proud of them: They had made it elsewhere. They had managed to leave and land in a place where none of us existed. I respected these men for that, envied them so much.

I did guess right: The hard work and the science it must have taken them to succeed at their mission. I was impressed. By the rigor. The tenacity. The bravery. These astronauts belonged to a kind I had never met. Their white suits impeccable. Columbia, the command module. The lunar module, Eagle / Tranquility Base. The Kennedy Space Center, which I had visited. Michael Collins and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr., the pilots. Armstrong of course. James Lovell heading the backup crew. Houston, Mission Control.

See, sweet one, I can remember all the names linked to the spaceflight, but not a single one from the commune, although we also viewed ourselves as flying quite high.

History records (in Wikipedia) that Buzz Aldrin spoke the first words ever pronounced on the lunar surface, saying: "Contact light! Okay, engine stop. ACA - out of detent." Armstrong replied "Out of detent," and Aldrin added, "Mode control - both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm - off. 413 is in."

I like that. Literature to my ears.

For a few hours, my mind had been clear and receptive, July 20 and 21 1969. Thinking I would maybe manage my way out of the poncho.

Laolao

17. Junk issues

During your last stay at my place, honey, you’ve lost the only object I had kept from my mother. It was a black rosary. It hung by the handle of the door next to my bed. My mother had that rosary wrapped around one of her hands when she died.

After she passed away, as I was getting ready to leave the hospital in the middle of the night, a nurse gave me a paper bag, which contained my mother’s belongings: Her dentures, her glasses, and the rosary. I quickly got rid of the dentures, hesitated a bit before throwing away the reading glasses, but kept the rosary.

I put it back into the brown paper bag, noticing it had suddenly become too big for its now minimal content. I thought it befitting.

With each step I took, I could hear the beads moving, rolling with a glass sound at the bottom of the bag.

I carried it all the way back home, walking through a cool summer night along the sleepy streets of the city. It felt good to walk. I was glad to live far away from the hospital. It would take a long time before reaching my destination.

I felt light, the bag mainly empty, mostly filled with the same tranquil air I was breathing from sidewalks to sidewalks.

My mother had not owned that rosary. It had been given to her a few hours before her death by the priest who had performed the last rites.

When I left for China, I took the rosary with me. I figured that the fact it had belonged to my mother only for a short while made it an adequate object to carry around, and somehow representative of how I felt. It was a safe thing to keep. You see, it was hers, but also not truly hers. Not an imbricated part of her history. Of our history.

It stood at the junction of her life and of her disappearance, at a moment where I stood there, witnessing the change.

As said, the rosary hung around a doorknob in my bedroom in Beijing for more than ten years. To be honest, I never paid much attention to it, until a few weeks ago, when you grabbed it and played with it as if it were a pretty necklace. I suddenly became aware that I had always been aware of the rosary's presence. I only pretended not to see it.

Here you were running full of joy, the rosary dangling around your neck. And I felt a pinch.

I know you, little one. The things you do. Like a busy squirrel, hiding nuts. You liked the rosary and I thought you might hide it somewhere in a place I would never find.

I could have stopped you right there. Taken the rosary back, put it in a safe place. Or, let events unfold without interfering.

Now, the rosary’s gone. Without much hope, I asked the maid to look for it, and as expected she never found it.

I feel everything’s fine. The way finally things should be.

I now discover that at last I have a sense of space. An object is not in itself a memory; it’s not a souvenir, not an attachment to the past. We keep things because we believe they hold a potential. They represent a hope, an imaginary future, something we think later we might use.

This is what I think: We lie to ourselves. Such vestiges are, in fact, things we dream, musing that they'll have a possible purpose or usefulness from which we might benefit one day. They are not linked to the past. They are a projection into the future.

We have kept this or that as a reflection of a fantasy to be unveiled in some vague fabrication of what life could become, much later. We accumulate as a way to get closer to the images we build around alternate existences we foresee for ourselves. We manufacture makebelieve helpfulness for situations we think await us, at some corner of yet-to-come realities: I don’t need this now, but I might need it later, when my entire being gets transformed, demanding the use of this object for which today I have no use for. But that I keep, in a waiting stance, in the realm of space.

That stuff helps me keep in my mind what tomorrow could be.

In other words, for the sake of a fictitious relationship to time, I give up space.

There’s hardly any room left for the present: This exact moment, the one where/when I am contemporary to myself, I occupy it as a solid form in space, it’s not a moment in time. Only the past and the future are time elements.

In order for me to be, right now, I must make space. Not time. Or I'll stay forever evanescent trying to catch up with dimensions that are unreal.

We collect not in the name of remembrance, not even to increase possessions, but really to protect ourselves against the pain we might one day experience if a fundamental need was to remain unfulfilled.

Artifacts do not point at what happened, they talk about what we think will become of us.

Either way, these objects, their masses, are extents in linear space, which can be measured to evaluate the grandeur of their time significance when that starts to dominate.

A tiny thing vanished. There are no longer any relics, objects with sentimental value in my home. You’ve taken care of that for your old grandma.

I feel much better now, sweetheart.

Laolao

16. The White Queen

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: It happens when you learn something, like a new word or expression, and shortly after, you encounter, often many times, this same word or expression. It suddenly seems to be all over the place.

You discover a new item, perhaps a pair of shoes you’ve never seen the like before, and you buy it, so proud to have something unique, but almost right away you start to notice that many other girls have the same too! You hadn’t been aware of that.

In a store selling used CDs you find John Lennon’s acoustic album. You had forgotten he had made one. You’re so excited because it’s rare, so special. And then, you start hearing the songs on the radio or as background music in the places you stop by.

And you think, what a coincidence…

From the perspective of the future, it’s what deja-vu experiences are to the past, I guess. Tricks your mind plays. Time displacements having to do with how well or badly your brain functions, the information it retains, the one it rejects, what it notices, what it remembers and how it does so.

And it has to do with probabilities. In a day, we’re bombarded with so much input. We eliminate from our mind most of it. But statistically, one I think could calculate the chances that we come across a word, a song, an object within a specific time period. If there’s a point of reference already there, in our thoughts, the word, song or the image of the object gets imprinted in our brain because now there’s a chain, a category to plug it in. If not, there’s no trace left. We don’t record the information. We let it go, not having ‘noticed’ it.

Try to explain that to my mother.

She never believed me.

She thought she had spiritual powers. Some privileged access to divine insights. A connection to higher levels of life forms trying to communicate with her.

With Tarot cards, crystals, yin and yang, she kept recalling everyone’s future.

Oh baby, it's so embarrassing to have a mother like that. You don’t know where to hide her when guests show up. You quickly run out of stories to explain to the neighbors some of the stuff she says. You get confused in the many lies and excuses you’ve made up to tame people’s reaction to her ethereal outbursts of celestial superiority.

And she was so drunk.

I found her one afternoon passed out on the floor, between the candles and the incense. You see, I was too small, too young. It was too early in my life. I knew I would never be able to bury her by myself. I understood her body was too heavy for me to carry all the way to the garden. These were my main concerns. There was no one to help. I was alone. Well almost, next to what I believed to be a corpse.

So I went for the only thing at my disposal. I let out a long scream. A powerful, profound one, which immediately plunged me into darkness. A variation on the theme of my seizures.

I think it woke her up, because I felt her slapping me out of that cozy void I had found for myself. And she was giving me a ton of shit for having alerted the entire neighborhood. She hadn’t foreseen that one.

Do you know what the White Queen said to Alice?

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

I never wanted to read Lewis Carroll. I read Jung instead who had read Through the Looking-Glass. And I didn’t flip when I realized Jung’s name was often spoken where I was, even though I hadn’t noticed it before having picked one of his books.

I read him at the psychiatric hospital where I was a patient in 1967. It's the place where I was told I wasn’t crazy. And perhaps because I needed to hear that often, I cumulated more than three years in such institutions.

Every time the White Queen attempted a visit and made a voodoo scene, the head nurses kicked her out.

Do you feel, baby, something’s absurd here?

Don’t answer. Just love me.

Laolao

15. Defense mechanisms

Almost no one ever understands how funny I am, my dear ones. I have an extremely well developed sense of humor, but hardly anyone gets it. Except my son. He can be very funny too.

Take those episodes of rigidity I underwent as a kid. They were not intentional, true, but still, they were in line with my sense of comicality. They were the fruit of unconscious pure wits.

This man often comes at my table these days when I'm sitting at the wi-fi café. He’s a bright guy, well traveled, cultivated. In a serious tone, almost every time, he compliments me on the way I dress. Since I don’t truly dress up and always wear black, occasionally neutral colors, I see quite well he’s being ironic. I nicely thank him for his praise. I might add I’m impressed that a man notices such things. I always find a way to return the compliment to him. I also mention that I do indeed take great care to match my garments properly.

Then, he heads for the next level, talks of the rainbow that I am as I enter the place. I play the falsely humble lady and insist he’s exaggerating. He touches my black necklace hanging against my black shirt and he professes that it’s perfect.

As we escalate, he offers me a glass of Chardonnay.

I don’t laugh. I don’t smile. It’s so much funnier that way.

You see, honey, he’ll do it again next time. He is so predictable, certain he’s the one pulling my leg. I can go through with this much longer than he can, look straight at his eyes and not budge.

He will never take the time, so busy he is reveling in his own joke, to realize mine is much funnier. And it is funnier mainly because he will never know about it.

Humor has to do with patience, baby.

A good joke takes a lot of time to develop. Months maybe. I’ve even waited years for the perfect conditions to converge toward the exact second where I must act.

You need to plan. To know. To detect patterns. To understand where you’re going. To have a clear goal and never lose sight of it. Then, you can wildly be funny, with an amazing poker face that will not betray you.

You can, of course, also find humor in little and more immediate situations.

I had a boss, years ago, a woman in her late forties who didn’t easily accept her age. She wasn’t much liked around the office, known as she was to steal ideas from others, building her reputation on other people’s work, going through a lot of trouble to mask the fact she was not herself very productive. But what a mundane she was. Showing off at cocktails in June with a mink coat.

She was very excited one afternoon at an invitation to attend a board of directors meeting. I recommended that for the occasion she should choose a blouse I had seen her wear once or twice, with lots of lace and satin appliqués, a blouse about two sizes too small for her, the buttons at the level of her large breasts stretching the fabric so much that they left a wide, open space through which her flabby flesh could be seen shaking like jello.

And you think she knew I was being nasty… She wore the damn blouse and even thanked me for the advice.

Eventually, I did get into a major fight with her. I felt we could, with the people we had internally, do much of the work ourselves, the texts, the graphics, as well as the layout, and stay within budget.

She looked down upon our skills. She said she preferred dealing with consultants, outsiders, much more professional, experienced, gifted, creative than we were, her own team.

Oh, did I make her pay for that. All the employees knew, but her, never.

I resigned my post after one of our arguments where she insinuated my style couldn’t be compared to that of PR people charging up to 10 times more than I did cost the company as a full-time editor.

Well, I was hired right away by the very agency she had meant to get for the job in question. When the stakes are high, I tell you baby, I’m good.

In a straightforward fashion, I explained the situation to my new employer… and I detailed my plan. And he just went along with it.

He did the pitch to get the contract we all knew was destined to his agency anyway. He never told my ex-boss I now worked for him, and he gave me the entire dossier to handle.

I thus coordinated and produced, without her ever being aware of the treachery, every concept, every strategy, every text, every page. And she maddeningly loved every bit of the product. Formerly congratulated the agency on its excellent innovative work.

See, dear ones, how hilarious this is.

That’s a truly amazing joke.

In my late twenties, my humor had a more slapstick edge. I used to work at the stock exchange, half-way between market surveillance and new listings. We had a very meticulous V-P unfortunately with severe social issues. As an example, he used to take a great deal of minuscule notes, during parties, that he would write on matchboxes. An awkward young man, accountant by profession. Very close to his mother with whom he lived and to whom he would whisper on the phone whenever she called at work.

At some point, like they tend to do, markets crash. Since we knew he held some shares, I had the wicked idea to ask someone to call him, pretending to be from the brokerage firm he had dealt with, offering him, as a poor ordinary investor who had lost money probably out of inexperience and lack of knowledge, some free training in the form of introductory classes to the stock market.

The poor awkward V-P was then put on speakers throughout the building as he clumsily tried to reject the offer without having to admit he was one of the vice-presidents.

He never even found out all the staff had listened to the embarrassing conversation. Again, that’s the beauty of the joke.

Two years later, he finally quit the stock exchange. I went to see our lawyer in chief and asked him to draw a special resignation letter for the man, and to make absolutely certain he would sign it before leaving.

It included the most farfetched “regulations” to be followed for a five-year period after the said resignation to prevent, the letter specified, insider trading, such as the rule forbidding him to step on the sidewalk near the stock exchange if he ever was to come back to this area.

Of course, my little ones, he signed it. Without an iota of hesitation.

Then, this other guy, hiding in the toilets to smoke cigarettes during breaks. How often did I succeed. 20 times? No. More like 30. No kidding.

A fire-cracker well implanted in one of the cigarettes in his package.

Time and time and time and time again, I did it. The silly, classic joke. He never suspected me. He never caught me while during an entire year, at least once every two weeks, a cigarette blew up in his face. Didn’t matter where or how he hid his pack. I even rewrapped new ones in their original cellophane when I correctly guessed he wouldn’t touch a pack already opened.

At quite regular intervals, there was always at least one of his cigarettes with a well hidden flare ready to go off at the first, third or fifth puff he took depending on how deeply the device had been inserted.

The best was to let him finally relax; to make him think he was miraculously out of the woods, and have the thing explode at the very last puff.

I’m never the person people will think of when they look for an incorrigible joker.

Let’s see. I did start a Guevarist style revolution in one of the high-schools I attended. Got all the girls from the most chic, richest part of town to walk out for a protest on a first of April… Of course, I was no longer there when Mother Superior showed up, terribly outraged, on the steps at the front of the school, to ask what all that riot was about.

None of the few hundred girls in the street had a reason to justify the racket they were making, and they looked rather silly answering that they had no idea why they were there.

Humor requires leadership, honey.

You need to get people to move. To do exactly what you want and when you want it.

Find unavowed weaknesses. Are they secretly hoping for a call from the Prime minister himself? Do it.

It cannot not work.

I did it. You can’t fail. Try.

The true challenge then becomes how to end the conversation with the 'Prime minister.' It works so well, it’s so funny. The victim starts talking and talking, so wrapped up in the honor that, after a while, hanging up becomes impossible. You can’t give away the joke. You must keep it up, whatever the cost or the ridicule. Don’t falter. Don’t laugh. Don’t back away.

Spot the best accomplices. They’re the key to success. They're the ones who will enable you to get away with it, untarnished. Unsuspected. Untouched. An impeccable comic.

Yes, comedy requires intelligence, a strong sense of organization, of planning, the ability to foresee potential problems or resistance, to anticipate. You need a vision.

Team spirit and HR management. Even conflict resolution skills.

To be a real clown means having the audacity to implement the project, to coordinate all of its aspects, to notice details. One must not be too hasty. Review the scenario a hundred times if necessary. Play it in your head. Change it. Weigh its effects, its consequences. Calculate the risks. Collect data. Analyze. Project into the future. Control variables. Go into decision-making and problem-solving modes. Show leadership throughout the development phases. Yes, I would have made a magnificent CEO. That’s the only joke I haven’t yet managed to pull.

Good luck babies. Have a ball. And don’t thank me.
Better, don’t mention my name.
And lastly, for escape, always have a good Plan B.

Laolao

14. Cold War

I’ll go by dates, ok? I need them to position myself in relation to you.

Today, 63 years ago, some eight years before my birth, Americans detonated their first atomic bomb. The ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed a few weeks later.

You will certainly, as you grow older, become familiar with the pictures of “House No. 1.” These black-and-white pictures are quite famous. The house was destroyed in about two seconds as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, a test conducted in Nevada the year of my birth.

I was almost two years old when, for the first time, two nuclear devices were triggered on the same day, also in Nevada.

This is the context I grew up in, all the way to the Cuban missile crisis. By then, I was nine. A politicized nine, dutifully trained at the duck-and-cover-under-your-desk tactic to survive nuclear attacks.

I don’t know about the others, the kids in my class, how they coped with the mood of the time, but I can tell you I didn’t fare that well.

I felt a responsibility. A fault that was mine. Certainly, as I look back, a disproportionate sense of self-importance for thinking my own doings were somehow involved. I did ask my parents much later what they had thought the day the first bomb fell on Japan. The day they had read about it in the news. My parents looked at me, puzzled, and didn’t say a thing as if the question was irrelevant.

Today, my parents are both gone. And I don’t have that answer.

In my hometown, the Cold War did go sometimes below zero.

Can anyone remember that poster showing the Earth against a blue sky, the planet threatened by a gigantic sickle suspended over its North Pole?

Nuns had explained that each time we sinned, the communists pushed the sickle down and, one day, if we kept on misbehaving, it would cut the Earth in two.

I was perhaps five or six. And not so smart for my age. My high sense of logic has always been detrimental to my mental health.

I had of course devised a procedure:

First thing to do, count the sins witnessed during the day. This implies that sins have already been defined and duly listed on the basis of predetermined criteria laid out by experts (such as nuns).

Two, multiply the number of sins in one’s immediate environment taking into account the world’s population so to have an approximate idea of the pressure put on that sickle.

Three, and that’s the tricky part, one needs to know the speed at which that sickle is coming down, and the distance it must cover before it reaches us – for this, I had to develop hypotheses and conservative estimates, a difficult task for someone my age.

Fourth, check the sky. Always, always check the sky. Never get your eyes off the sky. Calculations may be incorrect, but that sickle is getting closer, that’s sure, doesn’t matter what my numbers are. Eventually, it will appear as a shiny golden line over our head.

So, check the sky. Do not sleep. During the day in school, sit by the window. Check the sky, always, always. Must warn the others. Maybe we have a chance if we do not end up exactly where the Earth is split.

This is, my dear grand-children, how for the first time your Laolao fell.

My body stiff like a stone. Not fainting, no. I could hear, see, think. I was paralyzed, couldn’t move, not even my eyes.

I fell backward like a hard plank of wood, hit the floor, and just stayed there, immobile, unable to pick myself up.

I could hear the commotion around me. I could see faces bent over me. All my muscles as rigid as steel. No feelings. No fear. No questions. Just a slight surprise at finding myself so comfortable, so free within myself. I heard people shout I was dead. I tried to say I wasn’t, but realized I had no sound in me, no movements on my lips.

That was all. A vague impression of happiness, of lightness. The rest, completely deactivated.

It happened at school, grade one.

The nuns weren’t that stupid, they knew abnormal behavior when they saw it. Hence, they called my parents.

My father, the psychologist, said it was nothing to worry about. As a consequence, I spent a large part of my childhood falling into this weird kind of physical coma. Repeated-impromptu-annihilations of the body, each episode lasting for a few minutes. No interventions necessary. No help needed. No care given. Not a word at home about my peculiarities. I was stuck with these unusual collapses as if they were an integral part of my personality.

Wasn’t scared, but of course the other kids were. Didn’t make friends.

These bouts of catalepsy happened during quite a few years. I can only say that I owe their disappearance to only one person (don’t laugh, please): President Kennedy.

You see, it’s on TV. My mother thinks today could very well be the end of the universe The neighbors are already hidden in their basement. Kennedy is speaking to the world. October 1962. I don't think am afraid. I'm interested. I’m looking at this man on the TV screen. He sounds aware, concerned. He seems to have some sort of knowledge. He’s strong, I can tell by his words, the way he articulates them, clearly. I like his voice. He speaks in English. He lives far away. Maybe over there, men are something else. I wish I could go where he is. Things have specific names in his mouth. He has all sorts of words to describe his intentions. I’m sure he has thoughts because he speaks about them. I may not understand all of what he says, but he’s convinced me he’s saying something. I sense a purpose when he talks. It even seems important at times.

I’ll stay in front of the TV, I’ll watch him. I’ll wait for him. I might even believe.

The world did not end that day, nor the next day. My mother was wrong; the president, right. As for my father, I don’t know where he was, probably being a psychologist somewhere.

That, my sweet ones, it’s called closure. That’s what Kennedy did, he closed an era.

From the poster with the sick sickle to the messy missile crisis, I had busied myself expressing with my body's rigidity, or seizures, the idea of death. Made it into a joke, a caricature. Played with it. Imitated it. Tested it. Mocked it. Confirmed it. I gave it a shape. And a weight. A profile. I had proved it. Made it happen. Again and again for the skeptics.

Now, no longer an off-and-on 'cataleptic,' (for lack of a better term), I started to feel things. Anger. Of course, had absolutely to read Marx.

At 13, I tried to apply for membership with the Canadian Communist Party. At the time it made sense; it took into account stories and history. The guys over there told me to grow up. So I went back to reading. What else could I do?

Ciao, Laolao

13. Atmospheric search

As you play or sleep, my loved ones, I sink into predictable extremes, both still habitable. There it is, the report, as is:

1) Our entire biosphere is altering its boundaries – an abundance of organisms titillating a reactive atmosphere;

2) Inanimate predators have denied our high-tech world the nutrients it needs to regulate body temperature.

It is so hot and polluted where we are: An entangled, impractical chemical environment against your pink cheeks. A disparity between the cooling effect of my wishes, and an unconstrained, distorted moment of amplitude altering the material world.

Seasonal disobedience. Visceral hypochondria guarding against the imminence of unusable weather structures. The philosophy of our era drawn within the frames of holographic cartoons charged with grayish daydream bubbles. It is said to be entirely about greatness.

Trying to make things levitate with a beam of light or the power of ardent thoughts because electrons are all that matter in a somewhat dogmatic ‘wave + particle’ existence.

In the air, interference patterns marked as spam. Detecting particles unperturbed by the observation of false realities. Discrepancies to our current knowledge spreading like thick certainties. Unconcerned if we are exploding from or to a singularity.

I don’t know, I don’t know much about this, honey. I’m just getting old. Would it be important if I made more sense?

Atmospheric research will tell you one day, with loud overlapping delusional soundtracks, that conscious intent consists of conjugations of variables that have a direct influence on us, rational animals.

Deeper meaning is still believed to be found by resisting the solid state of human sentiments. By not giving in the uncertainty principle. Cryptographic coherence assigning values to planes and vectors of life insofar as they remain unexpressed.

There it is again: Fatefully described oblivion of the title “laolao,” except in your eyes little ones, because you don’t know yet what the human nature of simply being may refer to.

All around, an anarchy of powers displaying highly intelligible, user-friendly self-deception features meant to legitimize behavior in cases of absolute indifference.

I also find myself without an excuse or a potentiality. And it’s rather comic: My kingdom is subjective. I lack sufficient information to fail in a real situation. Surpassing myself outside of myself. The genesis of things, which exist independently of what’s in our head.

An indubitable finitude.

Our togetherness, my sweet ones, perceptible like a murmur passing through - the twilight of our reflections against a background of unconcealed zealous human activities.

We have lived these past three days separated by flourishing contaminants, it is true, but we have also winked at each other, thus articulating indirect exposure, a clandestine manifest of facial expressions, you and me conveying our ideas through glimpses at the demarcations of where we start and where we end, for we are not unfinished - even if the ambience absorbs all contours.

I'm only sure of this: I love you.

Laolao

12. Candied joy

Tomorrow, I’ll get to see you. I’m flying south for a long weekend.

My emotions have been fermenting since I booked the flight: A palette of goofy serpentine colors giving a buzz to my sometimes undulating sobriety /Outbursts of confetti bonding with me / An amalgam of parachutes majestically escorting my reconnaissance mission all the way to the shorelines.

I have faith in this forthcoming change in scenery, the three days we’ll spend together.

In poetic jargon, how can I put it?

• A sort of off-season pilgrimage, come what may;

• An overpowering sensation of consciousness into which I percolate, attuned to dangling dormant memories;

• An openness to aerial forms of experiences reminiscent of unofficial happiness – when conventional explanations no longer sustain life;

• That’s also when comparisons totally get lost in thoughts, never finding their way back;

• When one walks out of the cave, naked, aware it wasn't a philosophical monument;

• When one has finally ran out of company policies meant to respond to modern needs;

• Or when love-starved proponents of classical conditioning no longer lust for self-inflicted behavior modifications;

• In other words, when, without coercion, we fall into inscrutable rapture, effortlessly accountable as the custodians of wondrous secret sounds. Like rediscovered ancient texts we thought had vanished. So glad they haven't forsaken us.

By your side, I’ll reach a mood of meaningfulness best rendered by invisible writing. Fully illustrated by evanescent, volatile babbling.

It’s certainly going to be a splendid opportunity: Riding on a self-induced phenomenal flux, an avalanche of gesturing effects - realized abstractions to be committed to my burgeoning memory. Having the good sense of remaining vulnerable.

Entertaining a broad perspective capable of universalizing a blueprint for picturesque miracles

Among agile angels dispatched on cement and asphalt, I'll try to lose myself without a shiver of superstition. Pure nerves and intimate, pulsing inner voices racing to test the sheer essence of what reversed maximum performance can be like.

Fundamental absurdities assessing the intelligence of an emotion-based issue.

The latent tendencies of healing, and rightly so, thrown outside the influence of prosaic and impotent coping mechanisms.

Eager to cuddle. No distress to alleviate. No permanent trails left. Unglamorously blazing at the prospect of striking a profound chord, I suppose, in the midst of a ragged and throaty laughter.

The appearance of creation crossing my mind, referring to all epochs, cycles, cosmic portals, even a plurality of worlds, if the vision stays in visual contact.

You, little ones, in fully coalesced substances, edgeless, clearly with patience learning how to moon walk as if it was nothing more than a slight accidental promise.

Laolao