57. Like a rolling stone

Yes, there’s a major financial crisis in the US, and with the domino effect, it will soon have world repercussions.

Decades ago, I did work for a stock market, and before that I was even involved in derivatives as an assistant-trader. One can always say, after studying and passing exams to become a broker, that he or she understands financial markets. But that’s a lie.

In the years I spent in the business and financial world, the most remarkable thing I learned was how ignorant many of its tenants and actors were. Uninteresting, shallow people. Masters at deception. Selfish. Mainly filled with ambition.

I have met them. They were colleagues, bosses, acquaintances. An entire universe believing cash comes to those who deserve it, convinced bank accounts are a measure of one’s intelligence.

I have seen them trip each other, destroy opponents. I have heard them twist the truth about their own actions, shed away ethical values to advance themselves. I have witnessed lots of stupidity, treachery, deceit, cruelty. And you know what? This world has a strange way of functioning. The worst candidate for a position, as an example, usually gets it. Respectable individuals, those who analyze, have a broad mind, a generosity as a major motor component, are rarely picked to lead the way.

Executives do not necessarily choose the best, they often prefer to surround themselves with bootlickers.

One thing is sure: Eagerness to reach the top has nothing to do with one’s potential. It is a mind-set, a personality. Not a barometer indicating skills, knowledge or capability. Idiots can be very zealous and pushy, and are frequently cursed with a self-admiring temperament. They can also possess the ability to gather large troops composed of other idiots.

I say this based on decades of work in the business world. And it might explain why I've never tried to make my way upward, simply glad to pay food and bills at the end of the month. An allergic reaction to the mentality that surrounded me. People quick to judge. Reaching decisions on hunches. Not much different than (bad) gamblers. Unable to have a global view of a situation, their perspective ending at the tip of their nose. Loud mouths. Not truly talking, just bragging or repeating nonsense.

Maybe you’ll think I wasn’t lucky. That I fell in the wrong places. No. It’ everywhere. I spent much of my adult life having to endure foolishness reified as business conduct.

Or maybe you’ll say that it was my lack of flexibility, a fundamental negativity clouding my perceptions that were responsible for my unhappiness. A misfit among wolves. No. I’m pretty slow. I observe a long time before making up my mind. I wait. I leave a wide margin of maneuver to my opinions so to allow them to change course if need be. I’m extremely cautious work-wise, and spontaneously tend not to want to bite the hand that feeds me. Because I enjoy being loyal. A good soldier. But I'm unforgiving when I reach the certainty high-command behaves dishonorably.

So, for this financial crisis, I feel no pity for bankers and financiers. Not the slightest speck of sympathy. We are looking at robbers. Looters. Profiteers. Let’s call a cat a cat, hey. The fear these deciders are nourishing the public with benefits whom?

The bottom line questions should always be: On which side are the advantages? Who gains from a specific situation?

Most of the things I’ve learned in my young days about the economy are false. The reality of markets is far away from the principles taught in colleges and universities. But we keep on repeating the theory as if we were mentally handicapped and couldn’t notice it doesn’t work that way. The same goes for the principles of administration business students learn in management programs. I’ve never met a manager applying them. It all sounds reasonable on paper, but once in place, business leaders seem to use totally different parameters to arrive at decisions. And those are mostly subjective, aimed at self-protection.

And to finish, the media are delusional. They view their role as that of critical thinkers when they are, instead, taking sides that are pre-determined within the system. They even have difficulty using background material, quickly forgetting what they have themselves written in the past, not following up on lines of thoughts. They view a nation’s economy in terms of narrow political choices represented by the parties in place. It rarely goes further than that.

Oh well.

Dylan already sang it all:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.


Laolao

56. Queendom

Where have the mothers been?

Since I was able to delineate myself - to delineate in the sense of indicating a position, the “where-I-am-at-a-specific-time” - only when the hormones of motherhood kicked in (Where was I? Next to my child), it was the care I could provide that put a name on who I was.

I had become maman. A denomination that made sense and to which wholesomely I could answer to. Where on Earth I stood.

The beauty of that name, its merit, rests with its definition: An organization from which younger ones derive, as in ‘our mother house.’ To differentiate from 'our mother’s house,’ a possessive, the place where the children live, are tolerated, but still someone else’s home.

Also, an organization, not so much a person. A composite of functions, a plurality of roles, heterogeneity. The self divided to better accomplish a multitude of activities, latticework, a wide matrix of tiny seconds filled with enterprising ventures and risks.

Child care, thus, was the phenomenon by which I grew, in need of archetypical dialogue. Biological motherhood, an authenticated starting-point for nursery rhymes and versified poetry chronicling attachment, but without its disorders. Emphatic relationships responding to sensitivity across a lifespan. Nourishment. In departure from personal mythic traditions. The mammal part of me ready for its first private appearance. A tale and a pantomime to enrapture all offspring. Socio-emotional development thriving at the sound of whispered jingles, bedtime stories offering guidance and much needed metaphors. Experience stemming more from the fairy tale genre than from actual life skills. The biological system underlying emotional availability interacting with the infant’s gestures as windows of opportunities for the transit of miscellaneous information due to see surmises confirmed.

I was maman, which is unfortunately also a word for reproductive technologies, with prime connotations and a generic figure. A word often flavored with labor-intensive testimonials, outright manipulations and unresolved evolutionary conflicts. Internal chronology to support diapering ideology. Recounting the cycles of pedagogy, operationalization of pseudoscientific parenting. Inherently hostile educational views spewing the endless list of unrealistic obligations borne by the child.

So I was a maman, and to introduce myself, I had to shed the arrogance of knowledge. Converting into a mother without empirical support. Switching from punitive consequences to natural ones, relying on ditties, not policy statements, to secure attachment. Just-in-time production and a presence, no co-sponsor, as a way to avoid coercion. Nurturing for the sake of children, never to achieve one’s potential. Somehow incapable of solving riddles, but not ignoring the questions. An innovative approach to an epistemology capable of engendering both epic and archaic vocabulary. Amending mistakes not to become a continuity error. In the water of the fountain, some of the links in the chain of disasters rust and break.

Maman, letters swarming to form an old word with an untried meaning. Polymorphism beyond genetic traits. No valid measures to label parental models. Only inadvertent unconscious sins plotting an arc that shifts directions, finally moving toward the absence of self-prophetic abilities. Outwitting doctrines. Gifted with instinctive and unembellished references.

But where have the mothers been?

In a world of kinship, where all blood relationships are shown with subtitles, a person’s maternity gets challenged because it misconstrues role-playing games, a spoof after some hesitation renaming itself, and a landmark for immersion and perpetual gestation. A shadowy figure devoid of boundaries and woven from a compilation of hypnotized legal relations. Demonstrations of fine and experienced motherhood, profusion of melodramas nominated for awards, while despair is premiered underground.

Ploughed fields are seriously wounded. No restored queendoms.

Mothers have often been nowhere to be seen.

Laolao

55. Well-lit aria

A quick word to say I’ll be at your place in a little more than 24 hours. I have the plane ticket, preparing my bag this evening. So much work to do tomorrow, I might not have time and could forget some of the stuff I promised you.

I’ll be arriving in central China early in the afternoon, just in time to fetch you at the kindergarten with your mother. Truly sorry I’ll miss the show though. I love to hear you sing folk songs in Mandarin. Even Chinese versions of Walt Disney themes.

I must admit I’m particularly sensitive to your voices. I can reproduce them in my mind almost as if you were next to me. Of course, I recall your faces with precision, and easily remember how you move, the way you walk or sit, drink from a glass, or smile. But vocal timber has a special hold over me. Much more eloquent than a mnemonic picture. Reading/hearing voices. Not so much what they say, but what the pitch, volume, tone often unknowingly manage to disclose. That's what gets me first, not the words, but how they penetrate the ear and contort the realm of inner frequencies. A slight quiver. How breathing occurs in the midst of syllables, then echoes against the tympanic membrane, oscillations for moods and secrets like notes on a staff. How sound gets articulated. Its extent, how far it carries itself, and then rests, a time signature revealing how many beats per measure of understanding there needs to be.

Do people blurt out their story as if shamefully caught red-handed, or do they publicize themselves, blaring, tonic prominence put on self-serving vowels? Perhaps hiding under the pretense of shyness, sentences barely whispered, caught by the magnet of stillness. Other times, munching words like sticky candies activating the jaws, a biodegradable speech meant to be swallowed, not offered to the world.

Voices I like never seem to come from the larynx. They have an abdominal quality. Originating in the warm fullness of the body. No need to raise the volume to be heard, even from far away. Perspicuous waves, not so much clarity, but the lucid behavior of phonemes a noisy crowd wouldn’t bury. I don’t mean a deep, low voice either. Certainly not a loud one. More the property of transparency, a cleanness of the sound, a traveling strength, direct, honorable, and sovereign.

When I hear your voices, with all my subjectivity and bias, this is what I perceive. Every time surprised that children can possess that musical quality, like a perfect pitch, an instrument that can solo, distinguishable from its background, voices so tiny and yet, autonomous in their expressivity. Cutting through urban clamor without a shout, the stress of effort, unmindful of effects.

Is it because you have been exposed since birth to the guttural French ‘r’? The fast forward teamwork of teeth and tongue needed for the English ‘th…”? And the frolic four tones of Putonghua? Allophone plurality flexing parlance. Your throats undulating without attachment, indifferent to linguistic fixity, capable of independence, with an audible self-assurance surpassing the juvenile limits of your vocabulary. For this is what I always hear, attentive to your baby talk. A wide assertiveness as the foundation of your voice. A rare type of vibration oblivious to distances, penetrating with natural ease the thickness of clatter.

Do you see me at times shutting my eyes to better appreciate your voices? Taking them in, recording a melodic memory of our encounters. Never tired of listening to your vocalizations. Profoundly impressed by their caliber and range. Yes, I’ll say it again. I love your voices. Manifest circles gliding on water, unbounded.

At night, before I fall asleep, I recall the clarity of your giggles. Onomatopoeic splashes. The neat undulation of your babbling speech. In the darkness of my bedroom, I listen. How crisp and straightforward you sound. And I feel all is well. In good order. You'll grow into fine adults. It’s already inscribed in the neat way you pronounce. Hearable headlights brightening with a tuneful impression the long twisted path we follow on our way to sometimes saying something.

Laolao

54. Rain dance

There was a time when I danced. African and Hispanic bars because I would find there great partners to guide me across the wooden floors. Feet who knew what they were doing, accomplished, an absence of shyness when making decisions. Dancers with the ability to take the lead, understanding what my body could do on music, working with the intelligence movements always require, prepared to sense what a tempo can become for two people accompanying each other.

I would arrive alone in the middle of the night, entering places ideal for the irrelevance of names, and where beauty had to do with weightlessness, the kind of motion capable of transcending the body’s proportions. That’s when you could forget what you were made of, opting for osmosis with sound and cadenza. Your members, your organs no longer in the way, these parts that never seem to find the place where they’re supposed to fit. As if you were always too long, fierce, too tall for yourself. Overflowing your own shape. Ultra-visible, every cell too prominent. Your entire being so obvious, imprisoned in an anatomy of self-evidence.

Dancing to invalidate one’s form. Retaining only series of movements, those of a powerful microscopic atom at the heart of matter. Honed by rhythm. And electricity. Hidden by flawless steps and gestures, the only notions surviving under blinking spotlights, worth staging in the shadowless nightclubs and ballrooms where souls finally reveal their acetate-like dispositions.

Even forgetting about dancing itself, just the blend of mind and instincts, one’s identity transformed into an euphonic reflex, the physical having surrendered its heap to the blurred boundaries of resonance and pulse.

In those late hours, I was well. Not a person anymore. Just the perfect, self-abandoned dancer, never fearing that very instant at the mercy of the Other when control must be unconditionally forsaken. Accepting non-existence to be part of the experience. Such a deep faith. An unreserved course, trusting the ground, and the arms of men.

I danced and danced. Nights and nights. My dancing shoes a miracle. Whirling at the level where words recognize the superfluity of their nature. No conversation can be like a dance. Where eyes too are no longer needed, vision overtaken by insight, dimensions and coordinates included in melodies and their beat. Personalities going missing the time of a song.

Disremembering ideas about myself, that was when I could feel. Believe. Way over the naming of my being.

Above and beyond self-awareness, there was indeed a girl dancing and a drum. The notes and keys for a life. With everything a unique possibility. Accurately contemporary to oneself. Neither dwelling in the past, nor caring for a future. The immaculate feeling of a presence. Not an iota missing from that perception. Dancing with the men who captured that quality, modeling it with duplicity, artfulness. Who made somebody, an unquestioning body, out of me, unguarded, free. Given to them, an animated offering, for the sake of a passage into an immense resounding reality.

I did that for decades. Going out alone. Often lying, pretending to meet friends or relatives. A movie or a dinner. Instead, I would rush inside deepness, finding concealed dance floors housing staunch human fibers and their sweat, to dance pain away. To share a language I could finally air with fluency, a man there to respond and extend the message. To read intentions and reply with substance. All of us seeking significance in the circulation of dancers all around, the flux, together moving in a vein as if its warm red blood. Creating time and rain to render our steps anonymous. The scope of hope. Magnitudes for our movements. All the patterns of our heart’s weather. Unfailing lightning and thunder. And cyclonic winds pivoting on our heels.

So I danced.

Laolao

53. Sino-grime with a rhyme

The traffic is back, the pollution is back. A thick, heavy Sunday, grayness covering the eyesight like a dirty cloth choking the face, distress, a plight and a null-space. Aerial foam, froth. Pulling curtains over my home to hide its secrets and cement, to erase the trace. Oxygen’s ferment. The spectral images of the streets at noon parodying crepuscular ambiguity, doubting their neon twilight, when all kites had to flee. The mind a radar plowing a smoky, gloomy territory. Unwashable air draping all bodies, no longer aware, stagnant muddy ponds for sly skies and beyond these. Depth of nothingness. Nebulosity to harness a perspective we may not outlive.

The land of the amorphous. The building lost in formlessness. The indefinite as an address. This is where I kneel, slumbering in the vapors of grit, Morpheus.

Blind as we are, sleepily walking through an imprecise urbanity, we stretch a hand to caress again the spongy velvety fabric of the atmosphere. A large smear for a physique. Holding between our fingers the monochrome flow of people’s breath. Ghosts cycling in uttermost smog, land of the concrete exhaling its fumes. Not a fog, but a syndrome. As ethereal weight resumes. And I look for myself as I would look for escape, a retreat, the mortar and the gravel in a dull trance, all citizens merging into adulterated monotonies, not a chance, as unrecoverable from the landscape as they are from memories.

I look for myself, my shape consigned to oblivion in the mass of visible gas, a heartbeat heard in this accretion of floating sediments, the world as an impasse, drifting pigments, a sound which I cannot retrieve, dissolving itself in the depth of blankness. The eye showing incomprehension. Dust’s invasion. Each step I take suspended in the scary tenderness of a brownish haze. A specter as lover, devilish captor, embracing all of one’s pores. Unfazed. Concealing one’s isolation even more. A time to evanesce. A veil of dense molecules to disorientate. Scents of fuel. The semi-solid featurelessness of the air as a self-portrait, the eyelid covering the globe. So to enrobe the mess and the crime of grime. Or a simple sad eye for a silent sigh, the city's wimple as a key ornament, comrade.

Laolao

52. Money, sex, religion

About money again, because it was our poison. Loving it, clinging to it with compulsive enthusiasm. Or getting rid of it as if it was unsanitary. Two opposite stances: Defining one’s distinctiveness by the glitters of the dollar sign, or identifying one’s demise by the scurry of bank notes. On one side, petitioning the Almighty to win at the lottery. On the other, imploring Homo Sapiens to disregard the concept of payments.

Money was either the flawless solution to all ills, or their irrefutable root. It was here salvation, there damnation. There was no middle ground.

For my virtuous mother, money was wholly orgasmic. For my sullied father, it was an anti-climax destroying all the fun. A godly aphrodisiac. Or an unholy frustration device.

Indeed, from our family’s female perspective, cash was the wing allowing purity, righteousness to rise above the dirt Man carried into the house. And for the man of the house, it was the slime at the bottom of the foul tunnel through which he escaped.

I think, deep down, for my mother having lots of money meant she wouldn’t need to have sex. Whereas for my father it automatically lead to unrestrained carnal depravity.

You could clearly hear how the two positions got intermingled in the loud gruesome confrontations between my parents. Jumping lice and bounced checks finding their way into the same sentence. Arraignments targeting both how venereal diseases get transmitted and how fast bad credit spreads. All the time, monetary affairs merged with hanky-panky ones.

Practicalities forming an unusual bond, consensus reached, when my mother would announce with hysterical tones that not only would we go without food for a while, but also were forbidden to use the toilets at home on account of pubic crabs. No eating, no shitting. That seemed to make sense.

I have always made just enough money to see us through, barely finding what we thought we needed until the end of the month, necessities, whims, luxuries. Never accumulating at the bank. No savings. No discourse on the matter. Ignoring the long-term. Simply considering the day, what was best for you now. Laboring to meet those needs, whatever they were. Living like I had funds, resources, forever although they had to be invented day-to-day. No back-up plans. Nothing permanent. A compromise between my mother’s obsession with amassing security, and my father’s delinquent and inexcusable pecuniary conduct.

So I won’t be transferring to you any objects of value. No jewels, no insurance money, no inheritance. Just souvenirs of things we did together, of my love for you, heartfelt gestures, moments and words. Our concerns for each other. Efforts. And numerous victories, the only things at my credit. As I battled my way out of absurdity to make sure you’d be free from its repercussions. Often failing, true, but trying again.

That is the compromise I had to make to slowly build a functional sanity for all of us. Saying my farewells to all those who chose to stay behind, in the mind-numbing world where sex, religion and money end up jointly in the unilateral impetus for self-absorption.

For you I chose no material blissfulness, but no Inferno either.

I'm not that interested in learning if I was right or wrong to do so. It's not a debate. Just a fact now. The rest is up to you.

Laolao

51. Trump card

Younger, my interest for money was mainly carried by the amazement I felt when I considered what happened to a dollar bill as it passed through many hands, multiplying its effects. The money I had in my pocket had been in the wallet of another person before me. It had been earned, an employer somewhere had had it, that employer obtaining it from a customer maybe, who had in turn gotten it in exchange for doing a job or from a bank robbery, who knows.

That dollar in my pocket, I would soon spend it, throwing it back into the economy. The shop owner I would give it to would probably use it to buy products from someone, who in turn would pay another who might go shopping too, always that same dollar bill moving, floating around, traveling so often and far.

I would draw a tiny ‘x’ on my dollar bill to recognize it in case it would come back my way. I tried to imagine all the handbags, wallets, pockets it would encounter, all the things it would represent for each person touching it. How it would get transformed into something else, a different object, purpose, or need. There would be young and old women, tall men and shorter ones, rich and poor, healthy, sick, busy, bored, happy people, not so happy ones, all sorts of individuals handling that dollar bill, each one of them in a unique precise context. Keeping it for a long time, or an hour, perhaps just a minute before letting it go.

When I would pay at the store, I had a strong sense of involvement, perceiving my gesture as one belonging to a thread. Feeling it, the mystery of the journey, my hand only a transit station, a relay, all of us one by one being the energy money needs to continue its trip as we open our palm to either receive it or send it elsewhere. I would have loved to follow that dollar bill, look at those who would one day fold it away, curious about who they were, what they thought, what they looked like. I would try to picture their life, their conversations, their homes. Even the shape of the fingers eventually in contact with that piece of paper.

Whenever I received money, I saw first a secret, an invisible history. I thought such a dimension was important, the essence of money.

I was raised in a family where money was more than a concern, it was a cause. As such, it was alive, it had a decisive plan, destructive always. It triggered catastrophes. The unique reason behind adversity. Described as the origin of all tragedies. It was a sword with a will of its own, striking its victims out of pure malice and cruelty. Wrecking lives as a hobby. The disfigurement of all family relationships brought about not so much by its presence or absence, but by the slightest allusion to its existence. That’s how powerful money was for us. It didn’t even need to show up to elicit internal devastation. Its very idea was more than sufficient.

We moved to a rich part of town when I was about 12. A big old house facing a park where some of the oldest trees in the region could be found. Enormous trees, designing intricate shadows on the grass. Our neighbors were successful professionals, politicians, TV personalities, artists. A judge here. A top journalist there. Lots of doctors. A play writer. A deputy. Quite an elegant area. Kids my age reading books, articulating views on the world, well-traveled, their heads full of projects.

I quickly became aware of our status of nouveau riche. We were surrounded by old money. People who were used to having lots of it, parents, grandparents, grand-grand-parents, never a thought about money. At least, never speaking about it. People who moved around, in fact, as if money didn’t exist.

So, we had the house. But my father was regularly nowhere to be found. And when he was around, he lied. About bills.

The house seemed to me like a gigantic empty shell. It looked impressive from the street, but inside it was quite a different matter. Those damned bills.

I still see my mother calling companies to fill our furnace in the middle of the winter, all of them refusing to deliver because of outstanding, unpaid bills. No oil for us. My mother, on her way to the supermarket, stopping at the bank to withdraw money from the account she shared with my father, the one where she deposited her salary, only to find a negative balance. Nothing to eat, the fridge empty. No heating. The phone not yet disconnected (that would be the day after) ringing and ringing, a car dealer calling to inquire if my mother was satisfied with the new car her husband had just bought her. My mother answering – no, yelling – that she didn’t even have a driver’s permit.

That was hard on the soul, baby.

Three unfed freezing kids. My mother losing her mind. Between fits of moaning desperation, checking with the Tarot cards to see how my father would very soon, of course, be punished: The Fool, the Hanged Man, Death, the Tower, The Devil, all of them conspiring to represent my father on the kitchen table, the designs organizing his downfall, mystic sanctions for his selfish monetary policies.

My mother calling me to witness the verdict of the arcana. Making me repeat their meaning for additional confirmation: Chaos, crash, a dreadful transformation, the abyss, the ending of terrible cycles, or the inescapable.

The occult always on the side of the oppressed. Cartomancy fit for my kind of insight, trained at reading the flexible symbolism of the cards, my spiritual syndromes a guarantee divination would not fail to support my mother. Would not abandon her in these great times of needs. And times of great needs. Reading the future, clockwise, mystic traditions befalling me. Ready to amalgamate elements of alchemy with thoughts from the Kabbalah, divination at midnight, by the empty fridge, my mother insane with pain, uttering astrological threats, pleading with me, the Oracle, to remain as the magical instrument of revenge. Interpreting the wheel, an eye for an eye. Payback time as I unfolded the tactics the gods had concocted so to teach my father a terrible lesson.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t mind. It was a sort of literature, those medieval figures articulating murderous allegories. They soothed my mother. Divinatory meanings like motifs depicting one’s hope for an existence. The colors of an exit. The transport of fundamental messages from the Beyond, illustrations to underline the spoken promises of Justice herself. A book with changing pages, transiting knots, plots, shots at a world capable of understanding my mother’s grief. And her necessary drunkenness, imbibing to survive the uncharitable tide of debts drowning her dreams. No food, but never running out of gin and vodka. Figures, scenes, numbers, all with a story. Me, the editor. Opening the traveler’s tale, creating the fables, telltale anecdotes from the ghosts, divulging what’s ahead, a friend of fate, reassuring my mother: Her undeniable right to call on deities to settle scores and exact harsh retribution, to demand from spirits proper compensation for the unbearable vicissitudes constantly after her.

The cards from the Tarot de Marseille with a shape reminding me of the dollar bill. Exceptional moments when my mother almost sounded as if she cared about me. Pledging my father would be struck by lightning, or be the casualty of some other appalling mishap. How she appeared to love me then, the ally, the girl ranking her mother above all creatures before the matriarch would collapse, blotto. No more money to connect me to the world. Darkly silent as nothing would happen to save us during those long evenings. All supernatural trump cards having been played with sad but resolute adeptness, winning a few hours of cryptic communion with my mother. The money gone, not coming back. The ‘x’ for nothing. And the Tarot, inconsequential.

There would never be any help coming to exorcise the economy, or οἰκονομία, Greek for household management. No money, a word from the Latin referring to the goddess Juno, ironically for my mother the patroness of marriage, who, probably horrified, stood guard over the finances of the Roman empire throughout its decline.

Laolao

50. To walk the talk

A friend called yesterday, from the other side of the planet. So nice to hear his voice. Calling to remind me to write a text for a magazine of analysis and debate. Haven’t done that for a long time. And it must be in French. Do you think I can still handle verb tenses in a Latin language, well enough for publishers? And what about the accents on the vowels? I don’t have the keyboard for that.

Or am I making excuses?

There’s the topic too. Not sure I have something to say about it: The fear of China. I mean personally, I’m not scared. And I cannot really see from here how people elsewhere feel. I’ve been in China a long time, it’s home. You were born in Beijing. You’re among the first Chinese with blond hair and blue eyes. You attend school here. You’re native language is Mandarin. And you don’t like western food that much.

This lack of distance from the topic I've just summoned, is it another cop-out?

Analysis and debate, that’s altogether an issue. Can I still do it, be political, simultaneously theoretical and formidable? Honestly, I don’t think I can. Not that I ever did, though. Most of the time back then my writing so idiosyncratic, it even eluded me, and was praised for that virtue. But you would have been proud of your Laolao 30 years ago. Right in the heart of Paris, name them: The best actors, painters, photographers. I was with them, invited everywhere. My table at Café de Flore or chez Lipp. Published by the top post-modernists. Well-known philosophers as mentors and lovers. The great-Greats in literature taking me under their wings. Bada-boom. From my far away province straight to Les Champs Elysees at Fouquet's with the iconoclasts and fashion designers lending me outrageous fringues, not that much pret-a-porter, mind you. Evenings at La Coupole, porto and little gray schrimps to talk revolution. The young promising discovery. The female version of Georges Bataille. Living very Rive Gauche. Mistress of the most articulate and handsome ultra left-wing leaders, French, Italians. Yes, I was a pretty, sexy writer, sweethearts. They loved me, opened the doors, kept them gaping, introduced me, the propitious small-town nymphette. They also read me, quoted me. Saw me betray them. Excited about it. Showed me their own manuscripts. Drinking only champagne at La Closerie des Lilas. Cocktails at embassies with disabused prestigious foreign intellectuals. Known. Recognized. Talked to. And talked about. So many pirouetes. Gyrating. Conjecturing. Being told the in-depth stories of every stone, chair and table in Saint-Germain. All of us nothing less than a chef-d'oeuvre, the young and the old. So much above the vulgarity of money.

I had it all. Everything I wanted. I was exactly where, pedantically, I thought my place should be.

And I walked away. And stopped the writing altogether, except for a few sporadic texts for friends. Because they were friends. But never truly believing in what I was doing.

Three decades later, I still can’t account for my decision. Maybe because it wasn’t one. If you’re patient with me, I’ll discuss it later. But not now.

It’s only today, as I write to you, that I re-establish a form of link to the written word. Over time I’ve learned. Mostly about the cost linked to the work I had in mind in my early twenties. Also the implications it would have had for you, my children and grandchildren. There’s the question, too, about responsibility towards one’s work. I don’t think I was ready for that. In short, I may have had some form of talent, but certainly not the personality to go with it. And realized I definitely couldn't afford brilliance, real or dreamt. No difference.

So, this text I should write by the end of the year, what should I do?

Weak, I said yes, but extirpated a compromise, cowardice on my part. It was a yes under the condition I would do something light, possibly treating the topic with derision, provocative because that’s easy to do and it works all the time.

But then, why do it, right?

Can I try? Has enough time gone by? Can I inject a dash of meaning in a text without putting myself at risk? Unfortunately for me, I tend to think these are inseparable. That hasn’t changed.

One of the most important skills I’ve acquired in the past 30 years is to walk away. I sound here, but I’m not. I’ve perfected the art of the sentence so to make a decent living out of it, never exposing myself, safely withdrawn, like a technician watching the machine. Standing nearby, casually glancing his eye around. Intervening through the distance provided by good quality tools and easy-to-remember commands. It’s comfortable. Quiet. It’s an imitation of expertise in an environment where there’s no real competition. And it pays. I’ve fed and raised you with it.

Do not think it was pleasant, effortless, all that undoing I cleverly performed. One needs to be smart to discard articles of faith and a fine convoluted posture. Guilt, regrets, doubt, anger, they were constantly hanging over my head, troubling more than half my life basically busy at unlearning ideals.

And now that I know I’ve succeeded from a professional standpoint, having reached the trivial, at last the tranquil and decent nest of stereotypy, hackneyed ideas, the soft sheltering of linear syntax to render mental pictures that hardly need to be formed, will I walk away again? And to go where?

A pensive Laolao

49. One’s marbles

I bought you marbles. I will fly soon, in 10 days, and we’ll be able to play together. I’ll show you. We’ll draw a circle on the ground (I’ll bring the chalk or we can use a stick) and each our turn we’ll throw our glass balls to knock those we’ve already rolled inside the circle.

It’s not that fun really. After a few minutes, you’ll get bored.

I suspect you’ll quickly take the marbles and pretend they’re something else. You’ll put them in some plastic pots and pans to cook for a teddy bear. Or in your pocket as if they were coins to use when shopping at an imaginary grocery store. Maybe you’ll bury them in the yard to see if plants can grow out of them. You might even let them sink in the fish tank and watch them add forms and colors to the coral bed.

You’ve always diverted, rerouted your toys.

I like that about you.

I do not recall games in my childhood. Life was way too serious, and I couldn’t distract my focus, even for an instant, from the need to hold together all the parts I was made of, worried they would drift away if I was to let go.

But I did transfer my preoccupation, diligently surveying the outcomes of disembodiment. I cut a lot. To start with, the Sears catalogue. As soon as I had sufficient hand coordination to manage scissors, I felt compelled to try out new faces on the bodies printed on the pages, test the effects of different pairs of legs on the models. I would cut out the clothes and superpose them on the pictures of people there to show accessories, dresses, washing machines or cosmetics. Mix and match. I did that for hours. Reorganizing the looks of that multitude, hundreds of individuals all static in their poses, wanting them able to become other beings, stranger than they already were as strangers to me.

Day after day, I went on cutting and reassembling. You can view, it’s alright dear, I don't mind, such an obsessive activity as a kind of exorcism. Hourly rituals to keep harm at bay. Repetitions of the same to eventually make a big difference.

A mild form of self-inflicted autism, perhaps.

I knew very early on something was wrong. Because I was the only one capable of hearing my voice when I said so, I’m not well. My father-the-eminent-psychologist would not be acknowledging any time soon that his offspring was somewhat impaired. My mother-the-elegant-fashion-designer on her side would be doing the exact opposite, an exaggerated use of my peculiarities to explain and justify her own misery in the midst of suburban solitude.

Very little, in fact, was to be said about me as a young child. So I kept on cutting as an odd approach to society and its members. Narrowing my interests on new arrangements for Sears, the microcosm of the universe I knew I had to familiarize myself with, fragments isolated and handled one at a time so to, one day, be qualified to intermingle with the general population.

It was all about a recirculation of components. Tautologies to slowly form the habit of existing. Taming ideas by displacing them. Again and again and again. Making tiny portions, easier to embrace. Separating fractions, little lumps of two-dimensional people less aloof than those tall ones walking around with their unsettling noises and personal dramas.

As I was cutting and pasting, I medicated myself by not truly responding to my own name, convinced deep down I must have had other names that had been broken, splintered, in very ancient times impossible to recollect, scraps of names like the pieces of papers scattered around me on the floor, countless segments and their fathomless combinations. Cut, cut, cut, I would go. Slashing my way through childhood. Codifying small amounts, unfit to take it all in one shot, in one panoramic view. Cataloguing the catalogue. Tabulating humanity’s visual data, clouding the boundaries between organic and inorganic.

It was not therefore a game that I played, carefully ripping pages apart, not something to pass the time, or to entertain myself or others. When I was busy cutting and pasting, there were no others. Only the mechanical gestures required to hermetically shut down emotions, raising high up the skills to recognize and systemize the elements embroiled in life’s pandemonium, countering entropy, studying disarray to sort it all out, the facets, the details, every item urgently calling to be delineated and re-denominated. A big job. A mandate, duty to myself through restriction of behavior to make sure terra firma would stay intact under me despite new constructions and the elaboration of countless trial and non-permanent displays.

Not a hobby. Not a distraction. I had no sense of amusement back then.

I sternly zoomed in all my subject matters, a degree of concentration eclipsing everything else. An absolute generosity of time and energy, all devoted to the grouping and the new alignments of specks and shreds, their significance reconstituted along experimental grids. Searching for a benign way to be. An unfailing surface for things to be switched around and reconvened.

Your Laolao comes from far away, my darlings. Lots had to be undone, chiseled, truncated, before relationships became possible under the new management of shapes and measurements. Before I could grow, learn. Before I could be a person, creating other persons.

Like Lucky, this character in Waiting for Godot, I too have traveled a long time dragging a burdensome suitcase never thinking of simply leaving it behind. Though instead of rocks, mine’s filled with paper cut-outs. It’s a definite improvement, weight-wise.

So, for the game, please understand. I’ve checked the rules in Wikipedia. It will be my first time. I just look forward to being silly and not losing the marbles.

Ciao, Laolao

48. La maladie de l'emmurée vivante

It’s all about memes. Propagation. Contagion. Exposure. Inheritance. Transmission. Mutation. It’s all about us, the replicators. The carriers and explicators. It’s the story of traditions. Of our collective slogans. How we accept them, use them, and then spread them around.

Myths and intertextuality do they say (Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco). How it’s all shaped by others before we pretend it's ours. Borrowing. Stealing. Transforming even the disguise.

It's more than an influence. It is a mediation happening from the moment the perceiver establishes contact with the eidos – existence of the thing, an idea of its nature, since there is a viewer, hearer, smeller, toucher, taster as a gateway to welcome this thing into our world. And we make it ours, understanding it as imitation and reproduction of itself. An entire life in the shape of hypertext. Filled with echoes, allusions, references, boomerang thoughts. The beholders themselves encoded with the portraits they’ve witnessed: The fictional reality that was proposed to them, and said to be based on their image, and toward which they’re always marching.

From the principle of collage, of mosaic to that of fabric. Creating authentic, unrecognizable copies. Different from the originals they contain. Creating divergence by copying the same. Juxtaposing. Confusing the genuine. A bona fide result made of unpunctuated appropriations.

I have painted, I wrote, and, yes, made children within a nihilistic mind-frame. Thematic developments reinterpreting origins. Vocalizations in various formats, intimate public experiences. Physical drives encompassing impulses and thoughts erupting as confetti.

When it was announced to the-young-girl-I-once-was that I was going nowhere. Because they really did that at one point. Tell me I wouldn’t move. A predilection for fixity. A place where my narrating voice would never thrive. I considered the possibilities: They were either right or wrong. And I was going to make those two come true. Dissemination.

I have grown into a grand-mother. Incongruous. A bizarre, unforeseen fate. The-young-girl-I-once-was having had no splendor to offer. Just orchestrations. Translations and coordinations of metaphysical rhythms. Solidly plastered onto reinterpretations.

In the realm of catatonic disappearance, of vanishing acts, the psychologically disabled child immolates the body, a paralysis of everything from the skin to the bones, sick with fear, total stoppage: The same as playing dead at the front. In the gutter, hiding at the bottom of the communal burial ground.

Pathological density, the self surrounded by incapacitated flesh.

Along the lines of the locked-in syndrome. A walled-in alive experience. Disconnection without loss of cognitive functions. The intermittent vegetative state. Aware, awake, an entombed consciousness, all voluntary muscles in the body unresponsive. Hysteria. Somatization. No organic cause. Just terror as a unifying emotion.

In my late teens, they all thought I was done for.

Say the prayer for me, darling: It’s all about memes. Propagation. Contagion. Exposure. Inheritance. Transmission. Mutation. It’s all about us, the replicators. The carriers and explicators. It’s the story of traditions. Of our collective slogans. How we accept them, use them, and then spread them around.

I have loved you, my future, from day one, and have entered you walking the great distance from a doomed past to its departure. And by never finding myself, I did manage to leave that lost self behind, next to a psychiatric diagnosis I could not fully understand. When they said I would not go further, I would not communicate.

The only part that has remained true is that I've never figured out why it happened. Pseudo comas, an innate silent symphony constantly reflecting on frivolous, cavernous imitations of death. Solos for an orchestra without a musical score, no written instrumental parts.

I mean it. I almost didn’t make it, and by extension, by the meme, neither did you, my children and grandchildren. So we are left now, that's it, with a possibility of being happy. The minute we're over our tremendous anger at whoever, whatever screwed us up. For there had to be a reason, ascertains the intellectually curious.

Your Laolao

47. Let's imagine

WOW, dear kids, did you see that? The Large Hadron Collider was fired up today. At exactly 07:32 GMT. Where was I at that time? What was I doing?

I was teaching (logic, of course) to Chinese teenagers in a course about academic writing, explaining the qualities of argumentation. All men are mortal / Mr. Wang is a man / Therefore, Mr. Wang is mortal. That made everybody laugh. I was drawing sets on the white board. All cats are mortal. Mr. Wang is mortal. Does that make Mr. Wang a cat? We had fun. All that is yellow is a banana. What a coincidence, Miss Li’s shoes happened to be yellow today, bright sunny yellow. Is Miss Li wearing bananas? She was slightly embarrassed as we gladly pondered the logic.

That was my tiny contribution to the world of rigor today, parallel time-wise to this gigantic experiment happening in Europe. My minuscule drop for the betterment of knowledge and understanding. You see, baby, that’s why I get up the morning to go to work. I really intend, on my good days, to lessen the influence of stupidity. I'm a sort of missionary probably, meaning someone who likes to believe he or she can have a mission. Sounds tacky? I want these young people to be independent in their thinking. To be able to express their thoughts, and argue decently. They may not care right now. They probably don’t. But later, who knows? What we discussed today may resurface.

Often, I get desperate. My students are very withdrawn, quiet. Drifting. When they start in our school, they have already failed at so many things. The only child of well-to-do families with the means to pay tuition in a private institution, the public ones having rejected them. No interests. No desires, no vision of a future. Kids just floating. Passivity, indifference. Hardly any sense of pleasure. Few opinions, only the overwhelming effect of group-think on banal issues. But a lot of money to buy expensive clothes, gadgets, and cars.

The elite… We get them by the hundreds. And to keep them alert, their eyes opened, I must hide teaching under the guise of entertainment. Be funny. Gesticulate. Be very concrete in the way I introduce concepts. Work with examples, not openly with theories. Like today. It worked.

This morning, before class, I was correcting graphs, tables, charts made by the students. Not a single axis making sense. Absolute carelessness. Percentages not adding up. Elements thrown together not belonging to the same classes, categories. No purpose to the visual representation of data. What is it that you want to show? do I keep asking. Why this bar chart, why these lines or these points on the graph? What did you try to say? Explain it to me, try. Please. Why do you divide your information like this? What was your intention? They don't know. They're even surprised such questions can be asked.

It seems my mission is to save the wealthy from themselves. More precisely, to save us from people with the financial capabilities to do a lot of harm if they choose to remain that ignorant. I worry about such a future, you see. Not that the problem doesn't already exist. But in that future, I won't be there, you will. Who will look after you?

Do you think I ask too many questions? Perhaps it's scaring them away, pushing them further into their silence and apathy. But I want them to understand it's a language. It has a message. It's the same as using words. Don't be afraid because these are digits. You can do lots of things with data. Depending on the goals, the same data can be drawn differently, and used to express different ideas. That's called manipulation. It's important to understand this. How will these students function later unable to have a critical view at what surrounds them? What kind of decisions will they make later? And the consequences?

My students tend to think that doing something, anything, is sufficient. They’re taken aback when I tell them no, it’s not sufficient. It’s got to be good too. And "good" must be understood in the sense of "meaning." Do we have something here? Even the shadow of meaning would be a start.

I get a little reaction then. They straighten their shoulders, and stare, astonished, at me. As if it was news. Sometimes, I think it’s simply the word “no” that they’ve never heard before, and they wonder, honestly, what it means when applied to their world of spoiled kids. If I can teach them that, I will have done something perhaps useful.

So, the LHC. Lets come back to the topic. My mind is blown away by the magnitude of the enterprise, its goals, what it can teach us. Imagine. Working at re-creating the conditions just after the Big Bang, looking to explain the physical universe. It will take years before the analysis of the data leads to any conclusive evidence, I guess. Maybe not even during my lifetime. But in yours, probably. Imagine. Repeating trillions of times what is believed to have happened about 15 billion years ago. What made the galaxies, the stars, the planets. Us. Yes, all of us.

Sorry if I sound like I’m teaching again. Preachy. I'm just so impressed. And it's a feeling I enjoy. Rare.

The computer programs needed to process such quantities of information. Imagine. The staggering amount of data that will, of course, need to be handled by hundreds, maybe thousands of facilities around the world, data filtered, organized, flagged, decorticated, analyzed, evaluated, verified by so many people. A sustained collaborative effort, worldwide. Oh, imagine. Imagine.

Will the scientists find it, the "god particle," the Higgs boson? What has made the universe possible, what is thought to give matter its mass. The particle named after Peter Higgs, a Scottish scientist, in 1964. How old was I? 11. Imagine, dear. When I was 11 learning to multiply, to subtract, to properly count and draw simple geometrical shapes. And that man pointing to a particle that has never been observed. All in the mind. All from reasoning. Imagine. Making predictions about the existence of a sub-atomic particle no one can see. Postulate. Deduct. Think. Calculate. Wow. Try to imagine.

Do you understand why it’s so important? Imagine an instant that, eons ago, there was no mass. Nothing would have ever taken shape. Without mass, life would have never begun.

What will the protons do, smashed together at incredibly high energy levels inside the LHC tunnel? Will they generate these theoretical particles? Trillions of protons racing. The engineering of millions of collisions per second. The engineering of equipment capable of measuring the time needed for a particle to pass, a billionth of a second. I don’t think we can even start to imagine the applications that will rise one day from such technologies.

Oh yes, and the 11 dimensions, a chimera? Will the LHC enlighten us? Will the mathematical constructs of the past century hold? Who knows? Who knows? Oh, my darlings. The birth of our universe...

Even though I’m a layperson, I imagine. It teaches me something. About thinking and about doing, getting a better grasp of Gestalt, of what the parts can do, of their relationship to the whole. Of what many people working together can achieve that they cannot do alone, separately. Yes, imagine that.

Ok, my students were not as impressed as I was when I tried to interest them to the experience. And I don’t think colleagues were either. It’s alright. My amazement didn’t falter for that. I keep it within, focusing on Mr. Wang who’s mortal and who’s not a cat.

I asked the students to tell me if the following sentence was adequate from a logical perspective: Young Mr. Ma will fail his test because he didn’t study.

My students, who never study, knew this to be quite true from their personal experience. That’s inference, baby. And that was not my question. We should first start by saying Only those who study will pass the exam. Right?

Oh well. I’ll continue to explain this next time. It was a bit too much for a single class. And until then, they’ll keep on writing at college and university levels: I love Beijing because it’s the capital of China. Or: I prefer this brand of bottled water to other brands because water is the source of life.

Every time my blood pressure goes up. But I hang on. Somewhere in Switzerland protons are going faster and faster. And I imagine. The continuity, from me to you, from you to your own children, and their children. As particles appear, hopefully some that have not been seen since the beginning of times. A glance at how the building blocks of matter are made. It's for all of us, my sleepy students included. Generations to come.

Do not think I’m exalted, refusing to consider the dangers skeptics and doomsday-fortune-tellers have been announcing. Critics warning the LHC could create wormholes capable of swallowing the Earth. Alarms. Panic. Of course, I do not have the expertise to gauge the details of the experiment, nor, even if I had access to comprehensive data, could I study it to arrive at an absolutely well-informed evaluation of the risks. That's impossible.

So I am not telling you there are no risks. It’s reasonable to think there are probably some. But it’s also reasonable to think they've been addressed to the best of our current knowledge in the field of physics. Or not. We’ll therefore called these “(un)calculated risks.”

Understand me well. I don’t prescribe to the attitude we should blindly trust “experts.” Indeed, we must question them, but we must also remain aware that we can never know for sure what “safe” is. It is a relative concept. We look at probabilities.

What odds should we consider acceptable, do we only know? And who should answer such a question?

Danger being inevitable, how much of it can we endure and for the sake of what kind of gains?

Tomorrow, honey, it’s September 11th. In 1822, the Church admitted that it wasn’t necessarily heresy to claim, as Galileo had done almost two centuries earlier, that the Earth turns around the Sun. But do you know it’s only in 1992 that a pope officially admitted that the Earth wasn’t a stationary body?

You will always find people who resist ideas and progress. Even when the evidence and the facts are laid clearly before their eyes. When this happens, you must ask this: What will the cost be if you turn your back on an experience?

As I told you, dear ones, I happen often to teach the word “no,” because it is vital that we understand its meaning and its power, so to always use it appropriately.

Laolao

46. A critique of dialectic

I want to discuss the difference between contradiction and inconsistency. I’m ok with the meaning of incoherence. I can easily spot it. Nonsense, unintelligibility being the synonyms I would use to describe what's incoherent.

Fortunately for us, at home, nobody was incoherent. Even when my mother would share her theories about extraterrestrials to explain why Hasidic women cut their hair so short, she remained intelligible. She frequently made farfetched assumptions and wouldn’t base her judgment on any valid evidence, but her speech was for the most part grammatically correct. She suffered from a lack of critical thinking that allowed superstitions and a strong propensity for new-age gibberish to get the best of her. But she was not incoherent.

Where I’m not so clear, it’s how to call certain clashes between statements. The line can be blurry.

Lets pretend a mother first says “My daughter has emotional issues that were caused by her father’s behavior.” Then adds as an argument to support the claim, “Her father is a womanizer who has been unfaithful to me, hurting me, making my life miserable.”

What’s that? It’s not a contradiction as such. It’s an inconsistency due to the lack of correspondence between the two sentences, content-wise. They share a similar topic, the father’s behavior, that’s all. They do not address the same point.

Now, lets say instead, after the first claim, that the mother continues with “I’ve been alone dealing with that problem, her father absent, offering no help; I’ve done so much for my daughter, and she simply refuses to appreciate all those sacrifices I’ve made.” Is that a contradiction?

I mean, if the claim is that the father should bear responsibility for the problems as stated in the first sentence, how can the argument to support that very claim emphasize his non-involvement? Plus, the second part of the argument seems to imply the responsibility is with the daughter via her refusal. In short, the statements lead to different conclusions. They cannot belong to the same logical flow.

Very difficult.

My father one day visited me at the hospital. Actually, it was not a real visit. He didn’t enter the building. He stayed in his car, in the parking lot. I was given permission to go out and join him. He’s in his car, crying. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for him to tell me why he’s sad. And he says, sobbing “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I can barely help myself. You’ll have to manage on your own.”

I’m 15 years old at the time, and this is what I’m thinking as I’m hearing my father’s words: “I’m in a dormitory, night after night, with people regularly put in straitjacket, when they’re not pulling their pants down in the corridors to shit on the floor, people with saliva running down their chin, who are indeed incoherent if they speak at all. And to top that, I’m not crying, my father is.”

What’s that? What am I experiencing there? An inconsistency? A contradiction? An incongruity? An incompatibility? An inversion? A paradox?

How did dialectical materialism explain life’s absurdities? Is it by stating that people have conflicting goals and preoccupations? What about Hegel, seeing in contradictions and negations the dynamic quality underlying progress?

All in all, that must explain why I was the least evolved of the creatures back home, the only one needing the protection and care of the medical profession. I was the non-dialectician. My system of beliefs rejecting controversies, not wanting to have anything to do with opposing forces and assertions, unable to resolve disagreements through discussions with people characterized by constant inner strife.

Deep down, I couldn’t tolerate the principle of synthesis, the fusion, the combination of positions that basically denied the search for truth. I could not accept polemic, multiple negations, endless contradictions as a methodology, as a way to carry on one’s existence. This non-idealist manner, I hated it. I couldn’t understand it. That place, in the mind, where no one’s troubled by the inherent tensions among thoughts, I didn’t want to go there. It scared me. Such spaces felt fascist to me, grounds encouraging bad faith and dishonesty.

Once a thesis eloquently established, I know the step for its antithesis to be an entire matter of subjectivity. It can arise from any fiction the mind fancies as serving its own interest. There are no rules to dictate the selection of the contradiction. It ends up being anything. Being simply rhetorical. Not logical.

So I answered my father, not so much out of pity, but mostly to cut that conversation short, that I understood, and I told him not to worry.

That was not a synthesis, darling. That was a blatant lie. And no solution, no revolution were awaiting me on the horizon.

But I got out of the car and walked back into the hospital a bit improved, I must admit, Hegel and his idea of evolution slightly redeemed in my eyes. The other patients, from a comparative point-of-view, seeming not so bad after all.

So you can see, honey, why your Laolao’s search for a philosophy that would help make sense of her world led to so much confusion. And why that contradiction felt totally abject, impossible to apprehend.

Only the delirium I heard in my dorm at that point was soothing, because it was nonsensical, therefore irreproachable, never disaffirming itself.

Laolao

45. Boolean Logic

Whenever I skid on the slopes of emotions, or when, like now, my physical resistance is on the low side, I turn to aspects of life I find reliable, and which, as a result of their dependable character, I can easily understand.

In the first years of the Internet, as Web pages multiplied, I didn’t feel that much enthralled by the phenomenon. I was slow to become impressed. What was the use of so much information if it stayed fragmented, disorganized? I disliked this project of a network aimed simultaneously at all directions, sprouting like wild plants in an unruly, unkept field. It was not until I got acquainted with search engines based on Boolean logic that I accepted to seriously peek at the World Wide Web.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I simply enjoyed creating a universe, spotting its elements, spelling a specific scope, the chaining of operations, shoveling my way through sub-sets, including, excluding, unions and intersections, AND, OR, and the NOTs, the use of parentheses, and the symbols, their properties. All of these bringing an arithmetical clarity to the digital world. Tracing directions within a disoriented practice. Neat signs, like degrees on a sextant, to navigate through the layers of piled up data. A grammar to rank, divide, group; to identify species among thoughts; to name constellations of knowledge; to classify efforts, and find the proper lexicon for their titles.

I miss that. I realize that the “Advanced Search” feature of Google, with its form to be filled out, reproduces the Boolean system in a user-friendly way, but it neither has the poetry nor the flexibility the long coded sentences had for me.

It was very much like architecture, this building of intentions, of commands, designing gates for selected elements to pass through, defining one’s will with a sense of formalness which cleaned the air, getting rid of the agitation irritating my synapses, the muddy zones of affectivity that swallowed me. Rectifying hunches, articulating them around a syntax that made them intelligible, functional, useful. Writing to query one’s existential domain, systematizing questions so not to go astray, lost in irrelevant answers and meaningless statements.

So what do I do today? Searching remains an activity at which, I think, I still excel, colleagues looking up to me to find the information they need. If I can no longer take pride in the complexity of the quest, I now find some of it in the speed at which I find what’s required. But it’s no longer a therapy for my anxiety. It does not reverse my net tendency to make mistakes and misunderstand what's out there. It has become a repetitive exercise, a recipe producing slightly different variations of the same sauce. Or have I just become blasé?

The only efficient balm now rests with you. You remain the unexpected, the surprise, the wealth of possibilities impossible to narrow. Each one of you an infinite universe I will never encircle, for you are all in perpetual reconfiguration. So I quiet down, and shift the paradigms. I make lists. Things I could do for you. Lists of things I could buy for you. Things I can put away for you. Things I should bring you. And also lists of lists like maps to locate the roads, the lines, that lead to you.

Then, I feel better. I can burn the lists and start creating new ones. Different ones, for different times and moods, for different goals and results, for different ages and languages. With different pen colors and paper sizes. Selecting different order principles, by priorities, chronological, alphabetical, geographical. Sub-dividing the lists, inserting new sets of labels, sub-headings, and ideas for categorization, criteria unheard of for the exceptional situations you trigger. An unlimited text because you are complex, versatile, constantly changing and challenging. Beings with a true address, your own personal way to distribute potential through links, pathways and references, holding my hand every time to visit the new portals you've developed as you grow. Unthinkable for my lists to be comprehensive and up-to-date.

So you see, I’m fine.

Laolao

44. Camellias

My cold isn’t going away. It’s my Nth day of fever. It doesn’t climb very high, but it’s always there, a narrow fluctuation constantly nagging me. I’ve never had a good immune system.

When I was about 18, during one of my stay at the psychiatric hospital, a member of the medical staff, an intern I think, told me half-jokingly that my problem was much similar to the one La Dame aux camélias had.

A few nights ago, I looked again at Camille, the role of Marguerite Gautier played by a pale and gracious Greta Garbo, and wondered what I could have in common with such a character. I never was mundane nor enjoyed courtship like Marguerite did. I have never expected men to provide financially for my needs. And never sought a life of idleness.

What is it then that I shared with Marguerite?

The melancholia, of course. That, and perhaps the way the body translates the sadness into symptoms and illnesses. Marguerite’s willingness to abandon the fight. Her quick admission to unworthiness. Physical frailness leading to self-annihilation.

This is of course very subjective. We’ll never know how things really were. My version of events certainly clashing with what my sisters remember of our time spent together.

I haven’t talked, it’s true, about my two sisters. We haven’t been in touch since I’ve been in China. More than a decade, in fact. One is almost three years younger than I am, the other, about nine years. Although there were periods when we regularly saw each other, we were never close in the sense of friendship, of what the word implies of generosity and loyalty.

We were raised to be competitive and have been unable to outgrow this posture. I think we did try, though. But terribly failed. We ended up reproducing the same type of relationship my parents had to their own siblings. A rapport mainly made of contempt, jealousy, suspicion.

Because of the greater age difference, I always felt my youngest sister belonged to a different generation than mine. I’ve therefore been better acquainted with my other sister that I will call here, Louise.

As kids, Louise and I never played much together. In my souvenirs, I don’t really know where she was, and she probably doesn’t remember much about me neither. My mother had an expert way of separating us. I don’t think she even did that consciously. She just did it. For as deep as I can dig into the past, I see myself in a bubble filled with my mother’s presence. There’s no one else. And I am sure my sister feels the same way, a bubble for her too where she relates to our mother on an exclusive basis as I did in mine. In other words, my mother could only deal with us one at a time, isolating that link from everything else. In that bubble, we became my mother’s mirror, the recipient of her worries, the audience, what she used to confirm her own existence.

If my mother’s technique was the same for Louise and I, we nevertheless reacted to it quite differently.

Where I was weak, Louise was strong. Where I would fall, she would stand.

In my earliest souvenir of Louise, my mother is trying to force her to eat some seafood. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, and my mother is immensely angry at her, because she is refusing every bite, indifferent to threats of punishment, keeping her lips sealed. My mother becomes exasperated and forces the spoon into my sister’s mouth. A battle follows and my mother, fed up, sends her into the bedroom. As soon as my sister is on the other side of the door, she throws up all over the floor. I mean, not just a bit, but a geyser of puking. Vomit like I’ve never seen before. My sister is standing there, her feet in that disgusting pond, a look of pride in her eyes.

As I’m analyzing the scene, my mother on her knees having to clean the mess in the room, I’m understanding something fundamental about Louise. She knows how to punish our mother, she can stand up to her. She’s unafraid. She makes her pay. I can’t do that. I don’t know how to. My style is not to punish, it is to get punished.

I don’t know how Louise does what she does, but she does it well.

As said, we were kept apart during our childhood and only connected when we reached adulthood.

In more ways than one, the role I’ve played in my mother’s life resembles very much the one I later assumed in my sister’s life, that of the sufferer, the underdog, the one with the victim syndrome.

Louise used my mother’s strength like a boomerang, throwing it back at her; Me, I was hammered by it. My sister's self-centeredness was compact enough to oppose that of our mother. But since both of them needed someone lesser than they were, someone to boss around, to feel superior to, thus reinforcing their image, I guess for the two women I represented the ideal public, a sort of negative reflection of the narcissism that gave them so much power, stubbornness, stance and influence.

In that very sense, I used to resemble Marguerite, the indisposed, chagrined, the ailing creature, the one it’s safe to reject, to point a finger at, who protects herself with a fainting spell, a romantic tear at the corner of her eye, who easily feels guilty for other people’s misery, who becomes the care giver. The one with a body that can concretize the shapeless harm floating around, giving it a name, enabling diagnosis, attracting responsibility, a palpable propensity to accept blame and wrongdoing as the pillar supporting relationships. The one who gets into trouble to indicate how right others were. The one who gets sick so that others can live healthily ever after.

Such a dynamic is complex. Like in the case of the slave and the master, we’re never really sure who has the real power, for what is a master without a slave? The tension therefore builds up. The slave is not that innocent, you know, making the master look pretty nasty… All it takes to shake someone's self-declared reputation of nobility and grandeur is a soft melancholic sigh whispered by the heart, or rings under the eyes like the scars of mistreatment.

Ultimately, Marguerite is the only heroine that matters. She’s dead, yes, but her sad end is what reveals the nature of all the other characters in the story. She’s the altruist. They’re the egotistic fucks. Marguerite has gone to extreme length, putting her life on the line, to prove and win her point. She’s as manipulative as the others are, and from a certain perspective perhaps even more.

I admit it. I have always suspected as much about myself. But it doesn’t mean I could stop it. Only by leaving at the other end of the world, and staying away, far away, could I break the mold and stop my chronic subscription to the mannerism of affliction, privation and loss, and where it has always led, a symbolic kind of death in asylums, thus exposing the idiosyncrasies of family members. Hurting myself thinking it would unmask them.

But contrary to Marguerite, I did realize eventually there were other options. Crueler ones maybe. What if the slave does not die, but finds a happy way out and abandons the master? What if the only audience the narcissist knows suddenly moves to other shows on Earth? That's a bigger win. And a fundamentally vicious one.

I'm much aware of it, trying hard not to rejoice myself too much... After all, dear ones, I have you, my children, my grand-children. Whereas Narcissus, the self-admirer, ends up being nibbled by the seafood.

So the novel has been rewritten, adapted, with a new conclusion, the white camellias of early spring forgotten once the summer offers merrier, flashier bouquets. Then why, tell me, do I still cough, my psyche friable, a constant touch of fever to remind me that I've once loved myself breakable and damaged, bearer of a scent so weak it's almost unrecognizable? Why?

Laolao