YOUR LAOLAO

106. Self-hack?

2009-08-29T14:51:00.004+08:00

Making it illegible. Ciphertexting to myself. Absolutely certain I won’t have the key. Lacking in special knowledge to reverse the process. Deprived of decryption potential. Thus I write, unreadable. Information so confidential, it’s repudiated the minute it’s formed. That’s always been the protocol.

I must therefore hope that I’m a flawed system, and can be broken. Otherwise, deafening silences will remain untouched, intact, undiscussed. And me, ignorant – except for that single piece of intuitive understanding: Nothing can be kept secret which has already been revealed. But it’s the chicken-and-egg problem: The one about constantly scrambling the eggs, always about chickening out.

Laolao

105. Golden ratio(nal)

2009-08-07T17:08:00.006+08:00

Where is it? Where do I go? Where do I stay? Where is it that I bang my head on it? To say it blew my mind too.

Oxygen has a blue tint. And somebody says the sky is blue for the same reason, but I don’t think so. Diffraction may not have anything to do with the sky.

With respect to sunlight, what would answers be like at sunset?

Mendelbrot shapes, in solid colors, blue being an example. Looping factors connecting all into one giant pattern. It goes on forever. Self-referential. Perhaps a rare proof of irrationality. Golden spirals and fast calculations. Industrial-strength computational devices running after fractals, the seeds of flowers, or even brownish pine cones forgotten on the side of a road.

My head aches. It has now gone through enough iterations to realize that it contains hidden within itself, somewhere, somehow, every single bit of information that is possible.

But where is it? Where do I go? Where do I stay? Where is it that I bang my head on it. Hyper-lucid? Some of my thoughts organic; others, inorganic.

A golden ratio operating as a universal law hindering my precious inner balance. Never having strived for spiritual ideals. Just geometric ones. A triangle, yes. On my good days, a pyramid. Always Egyptian.

Laolao

104. Falling

2009-08-03T17:57:00.006+08:00

Some think something may be out there. Perhaps way out there, on the fringes of creation. Where our current cosmological horizon lies; and then there’s a ravine. Far beyond the known universe. With chunks of matter losing their balance, orbiting nothing.

In any direction from every location, you can view my properties. They look the same, stay the same. Uniformly improbable. My being an isotropic person, splashed across the heavens. Unimpeded. Of parochial significance. In a void devoid of universal meaning. Going over the edge of origins and evolution. Heading side-ways, downward, upward - without control. Detached. Being the same in every direction.

I hear it’s never the fall that hurts, but its sudden stop.

Laolao

103. Infinite slowness

2009-08-01T12:53:00.015+08:00

Don’t you feel it too? That time may soon vanish, if it hasn’t already done so. Everyone’s world fooled into thinking the universe is expanding at glorified accelerating rates, galaxies thought to be pulled apart by the darkest matters that can be. The law of gravity quickly becoming an oppressive law of silence. For nobody talks. No one notices. On a cosmic scale, imperceptible.

Lights from supernovae tracking the course of our life stories. Billions of years to practice how to slow the mind down until hell freezes over. A static moment for all of us. Like when clocks had not yet been invented. Infinite degrees of stillness.

I had meant to develop a perturbation theory that would have saved us all, a time-independent explanation. A way to measure emotional disturbances, all the artifacts of our consciousness. I had hoped to have a mission. To be a totally devoted missionary. I thought I had it in me. To come up with a system of ideas that would have accounted for the time that went missing. A set of principles as the basis of time’s progressive disappearance. I really had meant to be the one capable of justifying what’s supposed to happen. I did believe I could do it. To come up with a theorem that would have encompassed all the demonstrations proving time is not a constant.

If time has indeed emerged from the Big Bang, it can, you see, disappear. It could possess an intrinsic, eternal, unchanging moment when perception of space becomes dominant. Impossible to alter.

As I look into the past, I realize time definitely moves faster in that direction. But if I look towards the future, mine, I can’t see. Except for an unmovable place where I exist, within myself, transfixed.

What if the speed of light was found to be variable too? What would it do to all the images, their pigments, the shadows, their proportions? The images we entertain about ourselves and others? The images we have of our perception of time? Can I be the theoretician dismantling our ideology regarding all of this, can I? Can I? Be the one taking snapshots of the doctrines we hold about the progress of our existence, when in fact past, present, future are not a whole. Be the one showing you that dimensions can switch over?

I agree, we do seem to be traveling away from each other faster and faster. But it’s a false impression. Can I be the one articulating the hypothesis? That we are, in fact, motionless. Our souls. Our supposed grandeur. Our technological advances. We are the paradigm of successful immobility. We are the presence of matter that caused time to decelerate. And brake/break.

Time is not physical. We are. Time has no molecules, no particles. It has no waves. It only exists as long as movements do. The speed of time occurs while objects move. The current perception of time is therefore relative, but we don't have anything external to compare it to. Time might have collapsed so much that everything, from that perspective, does indeed seem to go so, so terribly fast. Ourselves first, at the top of the line. Evolving with stupendous velocity. As we proceed slower than we did in the past, all, and I mean all looks like it’s rushing by at an incredible pace.

I thus remain under the impression that it took me an enormous amount of time to get to you. To create you. To tackle the greatest cosmological mystery of all. You have acted, therefore, as an ultimate, powerful point of reference, creating time throughout my life, giving me the presentiment I'll always observe differences. Changes in quantities and qualities. Curving, then wrapping my mind around nicely explainable relations to both the space we occupy and the time we're occupied.

Yes, if I can wait an infinite amount of non-time for all of you, of us to happen, something is bound to happen. And we would continue to think we’re moving as if nothing had happened.

True, who needs to know that for non-accelerating objects, there must be reference frames that also have zero velocity?

Anyway, now you see how I feel when for too long we’re far apart. A strong issue of escalating brain-pain stretching time into a protracted, unbearable connotation.

Laolao

102. Electronic cortex

2009-07-17T17:47:00.017+08:00

I copy myself, immersed in degrees, layers of separation, and wonder right away whether I can be considered the same as the original me. And will minds identical to mine ultimately emerge, reconstructions elsewhere, other embodiments, somehow a new substrate to my image? Can I, then, communicate with myself? Neuron-by-neuron? And will the pronoun “I” be the ultimate fixed point for all my replicated identities?

I close my eyes and I see them: My future machines. Colossal knowledge scanning, digitalizing a human profile, my brain the biological child of an artificial intelligence. Genetic data encoded within a virtual reality.

I close my eyes and I feel it: Personalities evolving inside endless online spaces, outsourcing love and pain to external secondary systems made with the dust of flesh, clouds of upgraded representations of who we claim to be.

Memory pixels allowing avatars of myself to role-play alternate individualities. Neuromorphing software to capture my complete state of mind. Uploading exabytes of existential questions for my progeny to answer.

My physical experiences of the world reproduced, and then getting lost - a lack of interest from meta-search engines eye-tracking nothing else but meaningful fantasy platforms.

Will they get confused, permutated, the different people I can be? Incorporeal souls caught in cybernetic ecosystems, masses of programmed ideas and concepts reaching maturity as computer-generated life-forms, the databases of our ethereal properties having acquired self-transformative powers.

I promise. I will sacrifice primary consciousness for a user-generated environment. I will open a can of computer worms. I will hack and counter-hack clusters of differences all made of silicon. I will reverse-engineer a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. I promise. I will be born and contribute to problem-solving from day one. With a keyboard, I will maintain poetic illusions about a singular self whiling away its time.

I will reproduce my mammalian brain a trillion times. I promise. It will not be possible to distinguish this sudden amplitude from the presence of magic.

There will be, I promise, no signs of alien life in any of my futuristic realities, no cyborgs, only self-directed evolution. Only a colonized imagination, the painstaking process of data analysis preparing for anomie, and, of course, post-human changes.

Help me baby. Sometimes, I’m taken straight to the binary frontier of what’s possible. Where I instantly evaporate, somewhere, on my way from zero to one.

Laolao

101. VPN

2009-07-05T06:38:00.001+08:00

I’ll soon be going back to Beijing. I’m doing so with a VPN installed on my laptop, hoping that with encryption I’ll be able to access my blog. If I can’t, I’ll try to move it elsewhere, and, of course, I'll keep writing to you.

Laolao

100. Canada

2009-07-03T22:38:00.004+08:00

I’m in Canada, the land I’ve escaped from everyday for the past 11 years. A constant conscious effort, pulling myself away, extirpating my soul, my guilt, backing out a millimeter at a time, all energies into that specific persistent motion that running away constitutes.

But then, here I am now, under a pure blue sky, children and grandchildren busying themselves around me while I watch the same Sun as in Beijing.

This is what I wanted, to flee and come back, to sit in peace at the sound of leaves brushed by a light breeze, the little feet of kids marking the beat, birds and planes flying in mysterious patterns over my head. My voice finally quieting down, unheard, its tones almost invisible.

I wash the dishes and the cling-clang of the cups and plates summarizes what I’ve got to say. The splashes of water as I mop the floor stand as decent punctuation. The sound of the dryer for the laundry making long rotating sentences, tumbling up and down like lyrics I could have invented.

I sew buttons like important words awaiting to be traced on paper, fixed for a purpose, useful and appreciated. I handle the broom the way I handle myself, made for something, well defined in the dictionaries of all the languages that can be. I soak a shirt because of a stain, careful to clean my ideas by the same occasion. I stretch the sheets over the beds, flattening creases with two hands, for I do not wish any bumps or crevasses during my stay. Sometimes, clichés are the way to go.

This is time. These are hours I’m made to understand. An involvement with things that matter very much in the end.

This is a type of time I can definitely count on, which can remain anchored in the body, making itself be touched in all its height and width. Time I can measure using my fingers when they turn the wooden spoon in the spaghetti sauce or the oatmeal. A time I relate to, that has the smell of strawberries and sugar with a dash of thick cream.

This is the time I need, one for brushing and braiding your hair, fancy colored elastics to hold them in place. Specks of time to pick up your toys left in the hallway. Bright plastic shapes reminders of games and laughter, of evenings spent building Lego houses, and tickling you.

This is what I mean by time, drops of moments to add soap in the washing machine where your clothes float. The shape of towels awaiting to dry you by the swimming pool, the walks to the park where I’ll push the swing high and fast while you shout “Again, again!”

Indeed, I’m back for a short while, entirely back, running behind you, afraid you’ll fall and hurt your knee, holding your hand to cross the streets, wiping your face full of ice-cream, or holding a Kleenex to help you blow your nose.

I have now all the time in the world.

Let’s empty the garbage cans, clean the kitchen counters, put the groceries away in the cupboards and fridge. Lets rinse tomatoes, or peel peaches, prepare a bowl of blueberries, or unwrap and cut some cheese. Lets add some salt to the soup and crumble crackers, stir pasta in boiling water, or toast fresh bagels. Lets watch marinated kebabs roast on the barbecue. Dip French fries in a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup. Lets answer the phone and say hello. Read the morning newspaper, and set the table. Lets hear footsteps and awakening voices as the morning coffee brews. Climb the stairs, out of breath, to get your slippers, a T-shirt, an extra diaper.

Time devoted to cartoons on TV if it rains, or to watching flowers bloom in the garden, finding a name we all agree on for their unusual kind of purple. Of course, seeing animal shapes in the white puffy clouds. Or noticing stars at night. The dew on the wide rhubarb leaves as the sun rises, dandelions you pick for a bouquet.

All of that time, I know, and I know it well. Catching seconds suspended around my head to make them mine, able to rephrase different parts of the day, to even read myself back and recognize a signature.

Hear the wind meet the trees, gently rocking branches. Hear, hear. There are cars moving along. The vibrations of engines reaching the front porch. Lets open all the windows and their bright white curtains to allow the chipping of birds, the buzzing of flies, the slamming of car doors tell us what time it is for us, arranging our routines around the tangibility of household chores. Recurrent gestures, the narrow movements of familiar objects like dresses and pants drying outside on a rope, blue pins to hold them, sleeves flapping against the fence.

You’re improvising a tent with pillows and blankets. I open the parasol. Together, we water the basil, the parsley, and the lilac tree. I open the doors to let you in or out. I pay attention to voices and wonder whether there’s a hidden meaning I should catch the same way I grab all the time I can hold in my arms all at once.

The summer was, therefore, an ideal moment to come back. To perform a multitude of small tasks. To reply present whenever I show up. To accompany all of you in your adulthood and childhood, having at last gone so far away that, in a spherical world, I return to where I started. The place where I cannot go any further. The greatest distance from the beginning being itself, only separated by lots of time, by what’s required for realization to fully come about, pouring a glass of apple juice, or chopping a banana to put on your toast, zipping up your sweater while laughing at your jokes.

I become someone you know, wrapped in the fabric of days and weeks, serving some yogurt with fruits and then, washing the bowls. Waiting for your naps to end. I’ll answer the door and your questions. I’ll sing if you ask me too. And as I sit to contemplate the allures all that time has now taken, I feel pride and satisfaction. I’ll throw the red ball in your direction, blow soap bubbles, write on the sidewalk with chalk time and time again, to make it stay a bit longer, a bit wider and deeper, a bit more material, with a taste of soil, of grass with ants running wild, and grains of sand between your toes.

History is slowly backtracking. It is showing signs of withdrawals. A few hiccups sometimes, perhaps a cramp here and there, a tenth of a second for those resilient manifestations of panic, that’s all. Nothing more. I think it is finally leaving me, accepting to eventually set me free. History allowing me more and more to be contemporary to myself, there in the present, for it is so rare to meet oneself in that evanescent point in time. One is always either focused on the future, or hung up on the past. But to get a glimpse at who one is right now is exceptional, I think.

It only happens through simple, domestic gestures, where a sense of being matches the trajectory of hands ironing clothes, or pouring a glass of chocolate milk. This is when I know best who and where I am, and what precise tasks understanding has later to perform.

In such instances, the letters of the alphabet fall into place, gifted with a clear purpose. Time is no longer an entangled line, just a solid point on which to proudly stand, dusting shelves, rubbing a sink, taking meat out of the freezer for today’s lunch.

I find the roaring of the neighbor’s land-mower reassuring, like a grip into reality. Distant voices from the street, or the howl of a truck driving by like an auditory tapestry able to contain me, delineating a place into which I can safely move, without incidents or accidents, without fear of dilution. Making the beds, unfolding the tablecloth, all activities preventing sinking. A firm ground for my tiny thoughts, their joy expanding all the way to the extremities of the second where the entire world happens, with me in it, perfectly synchronized.

I am here, now, with a rag, a dishcloth. Or sitting outside sipping iced-tea. Watching over you. I am on that chair, on that sidewalk. I am turning on the hose to water the roses. I know why I am here. And know what ‘now’ looks and feels like.

In a way, this is what I expect from love, and how I view its gift. A strong location for the present, being on the same plane of existence as you all are, an encompassing appropriateness and straightforward satisfaction filling the cracks in my head, holding the pieces together. Tight and clean. Reliable surfaces. Tasting ham baked in maple syrup, boiling eggs for your breakfast, and listening to you giggle your mouth full.

It is fine to grow old, dear. So fine and softly warm. A time to fully be, each minute I encounter while fastening your sandals or turning the TV off, a wet facecloth to wipe your cheeks, mashing potatoes and carrots, finding a blanket if you shiver, bedtime stories and a few lullabies.

Laolao

99. A covert operation

2009-07-02T21:10:00.008+08:00

In a few minutes, you might think my tone gets cruel and heartless. Depicting without nuances a world that will look unilaterally detestable. And you will probably tell yourself: Things can never be that negative. That uniformly bad. Laolao is certainly blowing everything out of proportion, stuck to subjectivity and gloominess, bad faith having become her sole yard stick.

But to clarify the points I have in mind, I must, throughout this, indeed, one-sided narrative, insist on being mean, and self-centered, even pitiless. It will be because I am truly such a person. To approach my topic, there’s no other way I know of, but to focus on my primitive habits.

I’ve been wanting to take you there for a while now, so that you can have an idea where the women in our family come from. Ultimately, so that you can leave, for there is no other survival option. You need to understand that history at a younger age than I did, to give yourself plenty of time.

Lets get down to it: I’m about to show the aspect of my true Self that is ossified. That doesn’t feel anything, that doesn’t know love. That does not even care. The fossil of an embryo, for this is what remains. The rest is a construction, an afterthought, the a posteriori imitation of a person.

I’m also aware that everything I’ll say in this story will appear grotesque and ridiculous. It will be because the story is grotesque and ridiculous. No way around that either.

Don’t bother looking for a proof. Don’t say you’ll put aside what Laolao tells you today until you can validate her account. There’s no proof. There’s no available authentication process. This story has only known the women with whom I grew up with. It has systematically kept everyone else at bay.

These women, they’re not even aware the story exists, for it is in their nature not to recognize. Asking them would only result in forceful rebuttals.

Denial is the cornerstone of this story. Except for this: These women would immediately identify me, that’s for sure, but not themselves, of course. Using this partial acknowledgement to capture you in their net.

It would mean – at least, try to consider it - that the plot of the story makes sense, and is still operational. But once a captive, you wouldn’t know it. It would be the proof you seek, although a useless one for you wouldn’t be able to realize how caught you are.

So no need to ask around. Here’s what you would hear: That I’m biased, ungrateful, and disloyal. Lots of appointments with shrinks since childhood to support that. You would also be told that I’ve always been like that. But it wouldn’t matter much: In the end, you would hear that my perception, as troubled and intense as it might be, cannot tarnish the positive imprint these women have left here and there throughout their edifying life.

My account, so subjective and critical (I admit it), would not alter any of the grandiose outcomes these women have prompted since birth. It would not change anything to their stature and prowess, nor diminish any of their capabilities. It wouldn’t succeed either in trivializing their suffering. For we are all convinced in this family that our agony is a unique form of hyper-sensitivity, qualifying us as remarkable beings.

Be cautious, this story is about the essence of falsehood, its constant practice, its complete hold over personalities. It’s about chronic deception and fabrication. About people who were themselves pieces of fiction to start with. Therefore, the story can never sound true, reliable and honest. Its basis and material are found in fraud and illusions. And since I am an intrinsic part of the story, I use what’s at my disposal to draw the picture: a Machiavellian, unscrupulous tendency to twist things in one’s favor. An ineluctable, predetermined approach distinctive of our family’s communication strategy. And this is how, in that consistency, you should evaluate my story’s veracity.

It essentially has to do with abuse. Up to now, we’ve been unforthcoming about what has been done to us, and then, refined and reproduced by us. We’ve accomplished much more in the field of abuse than previous generations. We used our legacy well. Abuse crystallized in our midst. Fixing us beyond repair in a sphere of perpetual desecration.

Mistreatment was not an activity, not an invasion, an act from the outside. It was who we were. It could not be amputated, not even treated. It was our nucleus. It gave us life. It made life real for us. It made us real to ourselves.

We never fathomed there could be another way to live. While measuring our own importance against that of others, we only had this reference, leading us to believe we held the top positions we abundantly fantasized.

We even thought everybody was woven with abuse. A norm. We projected our condition unto the world, because, ourselves, we were projections. Not individuals. But a small tightly woven communal entity of codependences, glued together by abuse, each one of us relying on the harm done by one among us for the laudable purpose of asserting our existence.

We had roles, functions, not a life per say. Choices were narrow: You could be the thesis or the antithesis. Everyday was the same. The setting never changed. We remained day in, day out, pure inventions of our sickness, the produce of our own deviant fabrications. In fact, it was an industry. We gauged productivity in terms of output minus cost to our self-esteem.

It is within that global abuse that I get the words needed for this story. They’re the bolts and screws holding the torture machines together.

You’ll soon notice there are only two emotions present in the story, for we never experienced any other, just degrees of rage (that we’d identified with ‘dislikes’), and obsessions (that we mistook for manifestations of ‘love’). Remember: It is from within that place that I talk, for it has created me, entirely shaped me. Hence the airs of phoniness, the mood of subterfuge, the sense of cheating, the falsehood atmosphere hanging over my version of events. Again, view these as signs that the bottom-line of my narrative might be sound and consistent.

Don’t expect accuracy, details, not even facts. I’m unable to convey precision and transparency. It’s all opaque down here. Truth is unknown in that story. It never once made an appearance among the patterns in place all these years. I can only show you falsification tactics by demonstrating in real-time those fine techniques that were ours.

I can hint at many disguises though, for of course they fit me too, the many costumes worn by self-servicing goodness, those borrowed by fake generosity, the allures of victimization, imagined pain, the impersonation of martyrdom. I can articulate how self-sacrifice manages to conceal egotism. How tears are strictly a camouflage for indifference. How an expression such as ‘years of experience’ is a pseudonym for a static immaturity.

Despite my desire to share everything with you, I certainly cannot be frank or candid, I cannot pretend there’s a naked authenticity awaiting us somewhere in the chapters of my memory.

The torturous paths of my thoughts can only exemplify the extent of these deformations I want to show you.

It’s in all my faux pas that you can see our peregrination over and over our own centers. Trampling on ourselves with idolization. Fixated and fanatical. A sadistic disregard for anything but ourselves, and a remorseless lack of empathy. An amalgam of brutal inclinations. Sometimes transfigured into gestures of care and attention meant to hurt. Erupting like a blow, and an all-encompassing bruise in repeated attempts to confirm the authenticity of our individuality, and of our body. This is how we showed attachment to one another. Through injuries. Helping each other corroborate our aching state of being.

Do I exaggerate? See it worse than it was? Do I amplify what were only frequent bouts of stubbornness, assertiveness, a massive, but understandable will to develop one’s greatness, I mean here potential?

One could ask: Is it that reprehensible to be impressive? To indeed know we’re worthier than others? What if it’s true? That we are? Plus, isn’t expected that, out of resentment, others would denounce us for our incredible potential?

What if they were really blocking our righteous path, what if there were no other alternative than to devalue these opponents, all the way to extinction? Why were they standing there, anyway? See how responsibility can easily be shifted and renamed.

What if omnipotence is possible, and we’re the ones chosen for that privilege? Can anyone provide evidence to the contrary? And all these enemies we had, that multitude devoured by jealousy, isn’t it normal they should envy us? And that we had to protect ourselves? We would have been fools not to.

Am I making this up? Am I confusing natural personality traits that just happen to be magnificent and powerful with the mirage produced by this contorted mind of mine?

Would I be erring when I say our feelings were mere imitations? Because we did scream, bleed, devastated by horrors. We cramped, and felt profound distress. It was genuine. Our fear was as monumental as our belief in our almightiness was. We even have plenty of scars on exhibition to confirm our pain. Actually, not many people have that many marks.

Is this hyperbolism? People never could understand us. Much less appreciate us. They weren’t equipped to do so. Our dramas too complex and sophisticated. Beyond the grasp of comprehension. There’s a little touch of divine, here, see.

This is why when some people profess to have some knowledge about us, we know they’re idiots.

Is it delirium to claim we blended hate and fear into overreactions, so muscular that they defined our character? That we always responded with overwhelming force whenever threatened? But… isn’t customary to safeguard one’s integrity? To do all we can to survive? Particularly when we’re better than others.

I hear some blame. Who blames us? Who is this? Who are you? Do reveal yourself! Better, don’t. You wouldn’t survive. That’s how commanding and fierce we are. You wouldn’t last a minute. Run. Leave us untouched and undefeated.

I might really be sick in the head, you know, transferring on my surroundings all my symptoms. Can my idiosyncrasy be the cause of misinterpretations? But what does idiosyncrasy refer to? By definition, it’s what makes me unique? Special? Different? So, so notable. Again, trapped in the circular reflections of vanity, the very engine that kept us alive.

After all, I’m the one in constant need of a cure. Since infancy, causing problems. Still today, see, trying to move against the flow of our glorious course, never happy, never satisfied. Stubbornly declining what our constitution entitles us to. Filled with malice, harboring a disruptive nature. The renegade. My outpour today so in line with well-publicized behavioral issues.

That’s indeed concrete, don’t doubt that for an instant. I’m providing all the substantiation needed to discredit my own allegations. Shooting myself in the foot, one would say. Like I’ve always done. Just to annoy others. The ace of sabotage. On purpose, flunking where others excelled simply to ruin the congratulation party. As if I was born with the mandate to tarnish all that’s around me. Why couldn’t I simply be great? And nicely follow the trends set out by our special destiny?

Yes, I was and remain the incarnation of irritation itself. The origin of vexations, fomenting displeasure as a hobby. Busy spoiling adulation ceremonies. The constant reminder that this world, our world, is far from perfect. Unable to grasp the basics of pride and satisfaction. Obstinate. Eminently fallible. No sense of honor. A vulgar provocateur, dirtying the family’s temple, throwing in disarray the praise rituals constantly put into motion, for we really had no other pastime.

Destructive Laolao, just out to make trouble, framing others so that they’ll suffer more than her. Gesticulating, so out of sync, hijacking attention away from those who genuinely deserve it. Throwing neurotic rocks in the pond of positive self-assessments, she’s the ripples distorting facts, changing the view, uglifying what took a lifetime to shape. She should have stayed longer at the hospital. Cumulating those three years wasn’t enough.

On my part, isn’t it conceit too, my belief that I created so many problems for others, and all by myself?

An absolute self-centeredness when I see myself capable of wrecking elation-prone spirits? Isn't it another kind of narcissism? The sort that is hostile, that objects, finding energy and motivation in disputes. The opposite side, but still very much part of the issue.

Yes, they wouldn’t have figured out the irrevocability of their rights, if it hadn’t been for my permanent wrongs. They wouldn’t have had so much light if it hadn’t been for my dark aspects. They wouldn’t have been able to become so righteous if I hadn’t been in perpetual need for corrections. They wouldn’t have loved their life with such suave intensity, if it weren’t for the threats I posed.

My imperfections had a mission: to stress how dissimilar we were. Reassuring them, especially their conclusion that the vision they had of themselves was impeccable. My deranged outpours a necessity: Through them, they apprehended how virtuous they were, treasuring even more their own irreproachable conduct.

I was therefore essential, not that they would thank me for it, you know. They used me to insufflate a new vigor into their sense of accomplishment. I tell you, they did require maintenance, these ladies.

As a vital mirror image, I had, of course, to be of a reversed structure. That was my job. They couldn’t pretend to be strong unless I accepted my weaknesses They certainly wouldn’t have been able to convince themselves they were sane if I, simultaneously, had tried to do the same. In the end, it gave me leverage. I deliriously came to believe I could control emotional patterns.

One might say they wouldn’t have had ears, if I hadn’t been there shouting. They wouldn’t have talked with cohesion if I hadn’t had a voice to be raving with. They wouldn’t have seen themselves so clearly, if I hadn’t used my eyes to highlight their presence. They wouldn’t have known about their own existence if I hadn’t accepted to compromise mine with consistency.

They desperately needed a public, someone who could either applaud or boo (it didn’t really matter which), a screen where to transfer their sense of life, a stage where to display the talented actors they were.

My pain was so much in demand. Utilitarian and practical. Through it, they could acquire some for their own personal use. It gave them something to feel, something to discuss. It defined their contour and poured substance into their shape. My pain became theirs. They purified it. Elevated it. Fine-tuned its discourse.

Then, they sat me in front of them and forced me to listen. Over, and over, and over again. My million nods of compliance and fake sympathy, or my failed attempts to run and disappear, the symptoms of their demands for comfort. And when they ran out of things to say about themselves, their beings thinning into the air, we would crank the carrousel again, setting madness into motion, as in slashing my own veins for example, and all would get back to normalcy. Their ballooning ego once more visible above my screwed-up head.

Regularly, crises and accusations that I took too much place. That I triggered abuse with my hysterical attitude, forcing them into violent modes of operation. Imagine: that kid playing dead will be the death of us. That girl running away from us, she’s the one abandoning, not the abandoned.

As she gets locked up, tarnishing our reputation, we’re the one’s caught between a rock and a hard place. She sucks up our energy, so little left for the good actions we had intended. She robs us of all these opportunities to show how benevolent we are. And she leaves us with no other choice than to fight back.

Indeed, there’s nothing we wouldn’t have done for her. If she could be reasonable just for a minute, we would be able to restore our shine and rank. Once that’s done, we would have the means to really help her. She’s the one we love the most. Actually, there’s nobody but her in our heart.

More, she’s the only one who can make us feel profoundly miserable. That’s why she’s so important to us. We need her. Both her melancholia and masochistic rage are vital sources of nourishment. How else would we know the world? What other means are there to make us part of something real and tangible? How can we have a pulse if her arteries aren’t throbbing with torment? If fear and anxiety aren’t propelled through her nervous system? She’s our poisoned food. She’s the test we must pass. The challenge we must overcome in order to become. To have a name, and occupy the territories we merit. The more she hurts herself, the more we grow, the more we fulfill our inner promises. In short, the more disoriented she gets, the more we know who we are: Everything, except her.

Has anyone ever been more essential than me?

That conviction, that my aches were indispensable, the heart of relationships, the cement that held our universe together, my instinctive rushes to mutilate myself as if my traumas were the condition that kept others in good shape, my wounds the demented corroboration we had flesh, all of these, my own hallucinations, were a negative representation of the illness that afflicted us all.

Contrary to what I claimed back then, I am no different. Suffering from the same type of megalomania typical of the women in the family. Also positioning myself as a crucial pivot, a nucleus, even though a covert one. My self-admiration clandestine, and listed, as a trick to survive, under the “casualty” category. If it got too rough, under fatalities, just to be sure I’d be well hidden and would outlast them. My imagination, a tool for vengeance. Judging my successes by the exorbitant price I paid to make sure, when the time was ripe, they’d get in turn punished.

That’s how we were, in that family. The women. As for the man in the vicinity, I wouldn’t know. And neither did my sisters and mother.

He’s the mystery. The incongruity. So preoccupied with ourselves, we didn’t think about checking what he was doing. To us? To them? To me? Or to himself. Who knows?

As I enter old age, the past greets me with sorrow because I cannot understand any of the parts of my own history. Although I’m sure things could not have been different. We were who we were. A simple, natural case of genuine bad luck.

98. Blogs blocked

2009-06-21T17:19:00.006+08:00

Being located in China, I've been unable to post. Blogs keep being blocked, but I'll fix my problem soon while I'm back in Canada.

97. Crepuscular lights

2009-05-11T19:53:00.016+08:00

One of my earliest memory, I must have been three, perhaps four, is about amazing red lights gyrating in a room. I woke up one night in a bed that wasn’t mine. My parents’ I guess. I’m alone. The window of that room faces the street. Although the glass panel is covered by wooden slats, fiery flashes of light find their way in.

Noise must have interrupted my sleep. Metallic sounds from the hallway. The room’s door is shut tight. I can still hear voices, loud, urgent, from far away, probably from the kitchen at the back of the apartment. Despite the distance, they’re audible, I even think they might be shouts. But all I care about through that din are these red lights gushing through the blinds above the bed.

The rays move in rapid sweeps against the ceiling and the walls. I’ve never seen that before. It’s so beautiful. Everything around me becomes a bright rare red. A colored transparency that instantly shares its tint with whatever it touches. It comes and goes, swiftly turns in the room. I’m blown away by so much splendor. By the dazzling whirlwind in front of my eyes. It’s extremely bright, but not blinding. It’s powerful, but not scary. It’s omnipresent, but takes no space.

As the red light brushes against every object in the room, it highlights them with an exact sanguine contour. Every detail goes from darkness to a clear crimson presence. Everything flickers, winks. Bits and pieces blinking around me, while wide stripes of red glide in a circling movement on larger surfaces.

I’m in that bed and feel absolutely privileged to witness such luminous apparitions. To discover that red can be like that, slashing and unreserved. An unquestionable color, decisive, thorough. Outright clear and manifest. Of course, at that very young age, I don’t have that many words, but that’s the way I feel.

I’m so proud of the experience that I tell myself that’s all I need to know for now.

I’ll ignore the commotion outside the bedroom. I won’t acknowledge there’s an ambulance by our front door. That my mother is being taken away on a stretcher screaming, once again for it’s a pattern. Not the stretcher, but the ear-piercing laments that she’s about to die.

It’s usually my fault. But not that night. I was asleep. I couldn’t have done that. I’m sure I’m blameless, therefore I can fully enjoy the lights without any other thoughts. I’m free. No responsibilities. I can be sensitive to the dancing bright color. Even believe it's there for my sole amusement.

Better still: The world outside the room sounds so busy, turbulent, a raucous affair, that so occupied it will leave me alone, totally forget about me at least as long as the red beams keep their glaring pace. So I pray for the light show never to end.

I’m telling you about this incident because as I grew older, I became quite interested in the visible spectrum. I studied it, fascinated by that precise range of shades the human eye can perceive. I made collages out of my passion. In a table of opposites, black is juxtaposed to white, but to me, it was always red, the longest wavelength we can discern. It’s our extreme. The end of our ocular journey. We can go no further. When you see the color red, you are at the boundary of your visual space.

In terms of atmospheric optics, the red crepuscular rays that had entered the room I was in that night, these twisting shafts of lights adorning the walls and furniture, they were like the safelight in a photographer’s darkroom. Allowing the view to unfurl with immunity. It had meant security, refraction and scattering of distress, columns of sheltering light. Streaming through the gaps in the window, that luminosity had radiated around the dawn and the dusk of nightmares. Penetrating, finding holes in blackness. It had made the shadows flush. Given a rich ruby glow to all I could see.

That’s why so many of my collages are in red. I thought you might want to know, how much I appreciate that color. Beyond it, I'm sightless.

Laolao

96. In sync

2009-05-08T19:38:00.015+08:00

Curving back on myself in three dimensions and a fourth. Fictionalizing a global positioning system to locate the wormholes that would connect distant points in my thoughts. Figments of my imagination lighter than nothing, repelled instead of attracted, floating in deep space away from meteors. Deviating from the past. Each of my seconds never absolute, but fluctuating according to how experiences can move me around.

Spending most of my time at the subatomic level, I find an infinity of infinite answers, an affinity to them, because they're always dying in one place to be reborn elsewhere. Since their two moments vibrate in unison, I can retain some coherence as well as information.

Teleporting photonic ideas, applying beams of dense matter to explanations, and force fields to the atoms of my train of thoughts before they tumble down to an absolute zero temperature.

Suppose extreme entanglement. Suppose it’s traversable. That a theory of everything can make sense of even meaninglessness. Suppose we’re speculative entities meandering across complex spectral molecules, time traveling through dark times, ourselves our own event horizon.

Suppose that our throats can get crushed by the negative masses we swallow as we try to speak at the speed of light. Suppose we’re the creation of mathematics, of an abstract science, its very experiment as it tried to calculate radiation effects and disorders when establishing deep connections at micro-distances.

Wave amplitudes shaping electrons, one at a time, back and forth, no particular location, unable to tell differences as humanity keeps overlapping itself, an eternal folding and refolding of copies and originals. Transferring our bizarre state of consciousness into pulses of light occupied at shedding their energy away, to prove that bright bodies of knowledge can defeat the art of the impossible.

We’ve managed to attach our machines to nature, we've e-mailed ourselves over the wireless system of a Vedic philosophy, with a cc to many gods, transmitters-receivers invalidating each other. In sync. Repetitive signals from an electric storm. Telluric currents as evidence of partial sanity. Hitting the resonant frequency of our own fears while, simultaneously, we complain about it to the police.

Our volte-face are mind-blowing. All our tergiversations occuring at the same rate, our reversals as unescapable as a black-hole. And time is no arrow.

Laolao

95. On levers and catapults

2009-05-06T19:06:00.016+08:00

I tell you, this Wednesday was an excellent day for the blossoming of stupidity. I won’t mention the events, they’re not worth our time. Instead, I’ll reflect on my fear that the future may not have that much of a future if that interplay between clinging to ignorance and practicing its deployment doesn’t hit one day the principle of entropy. Idiocy, indeed, seems to be gaining energy and finding new adepts all the time.

These are the moments when I truly feel lonely, walls encircling me, airtight. My thoughts vacuum-sealed. My speech insulated. My hopefulness in a zip-lock. Potential hermetically cut off, with nowhere to go. Surrounded on all sides by a wide, vicious, high-risk cluelessness. Unenlightenment unfurling more of its thick darkness.

I tell you also, the tradition of vigorous debates has vanished.

The only light on the horizon is with Archimedes. Solutions perhaps available if we address the problems of our reasoning (or absence of) from a down-to-earth mechanical perspective, as burdensome as these issues may seem. Matter-of-factness to describe human dilemmas, as intractable or heavy as they may appear.

It is true that a huge weight can be moved by a tiny force. It’s our only chance. These fools out there aren’t equipped to understand that, unaware knowledge can affect lives.

It ensues that intellectual transformation can come from simply having a place where to stand, a firm position, given that we know there’s a precise relationship between the weight that hinders judgment and its distance from the fulcrum.

The exact place where a dash of cleverness can pivot, like a simple, efficient machine.

That would be my advice for today.

Laolao

94. Recto-verso

2009-05-05T19:24:00.018+08:00

Always wanted to go behind words, filled with expectations as to the physical reality of that hidden space. For space is the substance I would be interested in if I could get close enough to see, to experience the wave structure evolving on the far side of any word that can be.

What do the fundamentals of physics say about such a realm, the one beyond discrete things, separate things ending up interconnected through, for example, a sentence? The notion of time suddenly vibrating, combining its essence with its properties.

What would happen to understanding once it became an act of pure invention, of pure logical simplicity, an act evolving on the scale of parsimony?

What kind of knowledge would I then possess on the other side of words, the simplest explanation patiently awaiting to be? Probabilistic discourses gone, but the mind in attendance.

Behind words, there would be no meaning, only the irrelevancy of gravitational pull, the superfluousness of finite or infinite qualities to time and space.

But there would still be something that exists behind those words that I keep scratching, in that stubborn hope to reach their rear surface. There would be matter eternally. Redshifting, interacting bodies, mental events organized as occurrences in motion, finding their mass and solidity in the relationship they’d have to each other.

I would no longer have a need to seek meaning. I would be outside an expanding world. Out of reach of the Big Bang. I would be behind words. Where nothing collapses. Where there’s only activity. Only curves. No sound, although plenty of oscillations. At last, a part of the universe. Formed by everything the universe is.

Like all there is on the reverse, much further away than a noun or a verb, I would be a plain, uncomplicated rhythm.

This is what I truly hope to find behind words as I exhaust them with a relentless spherical beat of the heart. Energy exchanges and cosmological constants defining the field of codicology: The art of touching the verso.

Laolao

93. Lossitude

2009-04-26T22:47:00.006+08:00

There are minutes where I feel lost. I call such times moments of lossitude, when feelings resembling those of an abandoned child cling to me, despite my age. Minutes that see the annihilation of experience, a life falling into helplessness, ready to implode and then disappear sucked by the compactness of my mood. Instants neither melodramatic nor emotional. Just burning fast inside. A physical pain. A blistering heat wrecking walls, those divisions keeping thoughts in order. Igniting the partitions that protect mental categories, the mind suddenly in disarray, most cerebral enclosures safeguarding my sanity incinerated to ashes.

Long minutes of lossitude. I think many would label them anxiety.

Havoc. Bursts of entropy. A radical but silent collapse, for it can never be spelled out. Words simply run away from the disaster zone.

A few minutes only.

That lossitude is not a weakness of mine. It is a danger. I must always treat it as such.

Laolao

92. The morphology of fortitude

2009-04-23T18:35:00.018+08:00

I need words. I need lots of new words today. An obsession/compulsion. All the words I see are old used ones. I want new sounds. New syllables. I want to read an unknown lexicon so to discover it, plunge and sink into meanings I’ve never heard of. Learn again. From scratch, to see if ideas that were unthinkable till today can now be clearly articulated. Shaped on the screen. To point at things I could not imagine before these new phonemes came to be. I want new letters to express what waves beyond the reach of my vocal cords can sound like. New expressions to indicate the states of things we haven’t yet discussed. Something about extent, proportions, magnitudes that have escaped us. New measurements. A special language for subject matters we haven’t studied. I need new words. To hear how they're pronounced.

I need a different vocabulary, to break away from the poles of delusional pessimism and/or optimism maybe. To make promises that can be kept. To get rid of motivational speeches.

I want new verbal signs to transform mindsets. To better support images for what they are, and to help stop visualizing ourselves and our desires for success. No more positive thinking, wishful thinking. Just a nomenclature unable to tackle topics such as self-confidence, and aspirations.

I want a non-ethos phraseology. A tongue foreign to crowd-pleasing messages. I want risks to have clear names. I want to have idioms that fit the needs of courage, dimensions where the good side of hard times need not be reinforced. A jargon allergic to lies. No self-help recipes. I want realistic, lucid, well-enunciated disaster warnings. I want words for that. Not the ones with a double entendre. Not threats that end up feeling like reassurances. I don’t want sentences sanitizing bad news. Castrated words, pasteurized discourses. Terms whose main function is to disinfect meaning. Sterile dictions that have nothing to disclose.

I want words of the kind capable of creating understanding, acuity. Meant for information gathering. Plugged into insight and details. Words for perception and penetration. For our mental capacity for reconnaissance and exploration. For the dangers we encounter. I want words to designate particulars, not generalizations. I want a grammar meant for audacity and bravery, not for delays and detours. Words that do not retreat. Made for moments of adversity, words that know what it is to endure. Intrepid, undaunted. I want unflinching words. A language with the moral fiber of resilience.

Then, of course, I’ll listen.

laolao

91. The flâneur

2009-04-07T19:36:00.019+08:00

Looking at the world around me, my eyes given a virtual reality overlay. Thoughts superimposed, the transparent part of my field of vision imprinted with out of sight ideas, undetectable wireless enhancements. I see souls and navigate through the wrinkles of personality identifiers. Counting the genes dictating the particular evolution strategy of a number of individuals. From an adaptive point of view, how our usefulness may eventually run its course. Or in the eyes of nature, how we survive predation among ourselves. So many memory cells overstaying their welcome. Fleshing it out, the non-mystical process by which we’re untreatable as people. Unmutated. Engineering our own devolution. The machinery of vulnerability characterized by immortality. Having absorbed our inorganic precursors. Replenishment being a powerful matter of material animating forces, to paraphrase Bergson my own way. Not even ourselves within our grasp. In a hidden corner of the mind, the cryogenic preservation of unrealizable expectations. Alchemical approaches extrapolating therapies for our frozen frailties. Bypassing the need for an interface between emotions and intelligence.

Oh no, not EQ again. Pervasive downloads into our biological storage devices. High fidelity to being increasingly dumber. Dismantling sensory channels to reconstruct the non-essential information that allows a maximum degree of human control over unwanted transcendence. From a bioprogressive perspective, the hybridization between our extremely-evolved-limitations and our indispensable humanity. Always running in parallel to the idea of being constantly smarter. The same quantity of crap immediately available to all for perusal. No nose, but a flash drive. Bits of data about chronic and self-replicating paradisiac disabilities. Biocompatible with our behavioral tendencies to perform solar-scale computations about the human race as a special singularity. Hacking more markets to better exploit them. Our technological genius just another financial instrument. Rapacious games played in the cul-de-sac of our brain to overcome alien competition. Wall Street as a parallel universe. Or ideological science fundamentally broken. Invalidating rules.

The fiction of ideas is so marvelous, my darlings. Modeling my internal state after entities with little experience at economic interaction, going for decay-prone probabilities. A strong feeling of temporal compression to unzip. Flying computer nodes, easily distinguishable from magic. Imagining we're simply part of a tool-using specie wearing puzzling glasses to enlarge sensorial bandwidth. Abstract symbols for objects and their super-conductivity. Rearranging syntactical input, countering the plasticity of implants education has grafted like roadblocks on the ground of my research on the ingression of synthetics.

I will not explore the fast roads to fabulous new media. I think we only get smarter over time by having lots of sex and making babies. It’s a slow process, I know. Messier also, since AI developments for neurons do not need diaper change.

Convergence and offspring, genuinely both outmoded and futuristic. A vehicle for the building of narratives over many generations, the stuff passing through our creative membranes without architectural rupture. Experiencing a sense of accomplishment. Inducing a potential for immersive learning. In its midst, just to be a flâneur.

But then, it’s true, if it doesn’t work, I won’t hesitate to use my repulsion ray gun on all that internalized biotech precognition that horribly runs through our modern veins. And I’ll move forward as a female freak on her own ethical terms. Flâner would then be for later.

90. Smoke signals

2009-04-04T11:40:00.005+08:00

Like a cigarette hole where there used to be a face, that picture carried in one’s wallet, void has burnt, raged edges. A round scar through the layers of a Polaroid paper, plastic curling against the pressure of an intense incandescence. Souvenirs replaced by what can be seen through the punctured photograph when it is held in front of an inquisitive eye intending to face an eclipse. Ashes stuck to the perimeter, threads of cellophane intermingled with debris as vacuum suctions explosions of static scenes, all that’s captured without the need of permission.

I blow cigarette smoke through the holes. It comes out on the other side, the floating empty rings encircling the disappearance of the sun. Memory plumes, volutes of smoke joining cascades of clouds crazily diving into the horizon. How lost can I get before I ask for directions from migrating birds already far away. Their wings washing the day. Childhood monsters letting go of their cries and pain. The destroyer in me under hypnosis, keeping its balance on the youngest branch of a family tree. Never has love been so authentic. Oxidizing softness internalized like mad.

(There’s never any justice for the weak. Everyday the phone rings to repeat this. No eye contact, but hysterical balloons losing their air fast, whistling, flying out of control, crashing into the dilated tunnel of an iris.)

A drunk manual typewriter gone violent, hammering in red the prose of cryptic captions zigzagging under cultural illusions. The undecided descriptions of collective follies. Ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts, with yellowed filters crushed into mute accordions. Stained glass bringing fractured light to one’s anatomy and its long list of alibis. Shreds of tobacco sticking to the fingers holding the eraser going over one’s much needed solemnity. Perhaps not an eraser, but a hunter after the invisible circulation of ideas in search of a sound purpose.

The flame of the lighter at it again, brightening sunshine from behind the dark disc. Nicotine wrapping neurons with the very strings holding the stars high up in the sky. Tentacles of illumination networking their viewpoints. Interlocking their insights. Fine meshes for thoughts to bounce, a trampoline hosting mind-games. Untraceable veins of ruminations in the heart of the brain.

But then, I blow through holes only meant for the vapors of reverie, passages, for twists of contemplative cogitation, to allow reflections to reach the mirror site of airy suspensions.

See the mental trellis they weave. I rest on that foggy hammock. Safe, gently rocked by the white puffs escaping from my lips. Messages for distant people to read. Since today you’ve gone back home. While I return to loop-shaped writing habits.

89. c u

2009-03-24T20:18:00.003+08:00

You’re flying tomorrow and will be arriving at my place late in the evening. All will be ready, a snack, one of your favorite movies loaded in the DVD player, your toy box, your beds. I will have removed and hidden what’s dangerous, my scissors, the glue and chemicals I use for my collages, glass objects you could reach.

I’ve applied for a few days leave from work so to spend time with you. We’ll paint, draw, play. I’ll take you out for lunch. But the most important thing we’ll do is talk. I’ll listen carefully to your voices. You’ll tell me about kindergarten, friends, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, perhaps adventures involving the dogs or cats in your neighborhood. Your rollerblade escapades. Family outings. A new song you’ve learned. Tripping over your words as you’ll be so impetuous, so many things to say all at once, borrowing from three languages to make ideas sharp and complete, syllables thrown high in the air like star dust suddenly flowing against the night. You’ll want me to know everything in one shot. You’ll forget to breathe. And then you’ll put your arms around me and hold me tight, whispering into my ear how happy you are to be at my place. Yes, you do that.

I’ll marvel about how fast you grow, how in only a few weeks you’ve changed. Your vocabulary exploding along different routes, your expressions more precise, your sentences versatile and animated. Your stories filled with transitions and pauses, more details. Degrees introduced. I’ll be listening with my skin, my eyes, my smile. Admiring your pride. The diamond light on your face, your giggling overtones when you speak and I understand.

We’ll chat and chat. Partaking in energetic conversations. Your sense of humor peppering the gossip.

And I’ll trace in my mind all the furrows we need to record your voices. In French, for it is in that language that our love is the deepest. In Mandarin, because we’re having so much fun. And in English, since once in a while we should also include others.

Laolao

88. Laconophilia

2009-03-23T19:00:00.009+08:00

I listen to economists, to political, financial experts, business leaders and analysts, and wonder if there is a limit to puerility.

The lack of inner discipline, of rigor. Of intellectual architecture. Nothing else but frail edifices to house knowledge. Only gut feelings to support arguments. Everything is warm, moist, fuzzy. The science of thinking washed away with liquid justifications, softened, diluted. It drools. A weak, discolored fiction.

And these are our leaders. Directionless. Dangerous. A well-marketed look of pensiveness to hide the fact they don’t have a clue about what they’re saying. Never the strength to perform demanding tasks. Porous memories.

I am angry. Humans were supposed to have been designed in line with the image of God. What’s wrong, then, with our divinities? How could they come up with such limitations. Smallness. Narrowness. Insufficient ideated weight.

I hate it when speakers, writers, bosses treat us like idiots.

Never applaud these people. Never be a follower. See them for what they are. Stare a minute to remember if you must. Then, turn your back. Walk away. Go far.

Yes, be wary of mushy discourses. Of what feels comfortable, contended with anemic explanations. Wet words leaking, spreading sloppy niceties into the brain. Infecting mental functions.

Be careful. Go for what’s icy and severe. For what’s robust. For what sounds tough, unyielding at the touch. For what’s stony, unfriendly. The ruthless. Leave behind what’s gentle and made to please and reassure. That’s a trick. It will decompose you. A lot of sap.

Never fear Sparta, dear. Never. Be a good soldier. A good poet. Create men and women. Not entrapping, beguiling sentiments posing as the songs of powwow.

Love, Laolao

87. Kamala, temples and labs

2009-03-21T15:21:00.018+08:00

I’m waiting – eager, excited, stretched forward to a maximum – for the two final episodes of Battlestar Galactica, to be aired today. Science-fiction. Yep. I’ve no problem saying it: I often prefer sitting in front of the screen with BSG than watching the reality within my skull unfold, which means that I, for one, can tell the difference.

BSG has tackled some of the issues occupying western civilization today. As far as we can tell. How science and religion cope with each other. Anxieties about technologies. About our creations. The city.

Then, the plurality and/or singularity underlying beliefs. Eternal questions about mortality and the recycling destiny of matter. What are goals, where is it we think we’re going. Are we heading forward or simply fleeing. How do we define humanity, divinities. And that History that keeps repeating itself, as if we weren’t learning much despite our self-proclaimed prowess.

Also, leadership models. Why do people listen and follow, band together or break away. What’s in the justification of war. That enemy is so much like us. Could I be a cylon. Who is, I can’t tell. Can I give birth. Should I. Can reproduction be a philosophical issue, be an ethical one. The machine and the flesh, how do they combine. Can they. Should they. Sex and violence. The inevitability. Investigating destiny, since nature is what it is. A circle and the Return of the Same. A sameness that is changed once it comes back to its origin. For having traveled through all of its potential fates. And what are these mistakes that keep trapping us, making no difference in the outcome. Or do they.

BSG is a show about tons of questions.

The ones modern intelligentsia has stopped asking in a penetrable, lucid way. Articulated by TV script writers, actors and special effects technicians. Brilliant, because they don’t try to provide answers, but widen the mystery, elevating our understanding difficulties to new problematic dimensions. A new prose. A selection of images and sounds adding depth to our main enigmas. As we are lost in that huge space, civilian ships clinging to Galactica, a fragile balance of powers, always moving, delicate, and in danger. Victory and defeat annulling each other, although good at characterizing the struggles by which we define our worth.

They are no aliens. There’s us and what we did. And it is what we did that stands in the path. Interesting. That the gods of Kobol did give up on us. And that we lied to ourselves. And will lie to ourselves again. It has already happened, and it will happen again.

Political, because democracy is no perfect solution. But it is part of the leading question. The one about turmoil. But so is the military. So are all our inventions. Imperfections being so perfect in organizing ourselves as a society defined by tensions. As we jump, disappear and appear. Should I network or not network. Paranoid as the enemy is in our ranks, am I its double or is it mine. Am I modeled after him, or is he modeled after me. We give birth to each other, murder each other. And start the same thing over and over. Dictators. A minute as the puppet of an armed authoritarian regime, later as preacher of a religious sect. Qualification: science. Was that a question. A go(o)d question. A one about seduction. Not so much principles.

Yes, I have enjoyed every scenes of Battlestar Galactica. The thrill. The beauty of possibilities. The plots. The ramifications. The characters. The Vipers. The signs pointing to humanity. Every second of confusion as we vented air and water. As machines could feel love. And us hatred. But then, we also loved and they hated. As we often lost more than we gained in terms of knowing. Questions getting bigger with each episode like they do in my life. Interested by the role of failure and shortcomings. By the magnificence of it all. When tolerance makes it way. And it is because we start again and again. Equal perseverance of the good and the evil, a quest for Earth. Destruction and creation. An inquiry into causes, effects and evolution (if there is one). The colonies, the colonizers, the colonized. The horoscopes. Matters of attitude, organic matter. Investigating throughout the script what matters most to us. And why some other things don't.

Investigation into the fiction of science, and the science of fiction. Art and violence. Culture and reproduction. Technologies as a part of nature. What is a purpose, and what are the means and limitations leading gloriously to achievements, fiascos. Are they different. Boomer and Starbuck. The President and the Commander. The Chief and Gaius. Apollo and Saul Tigh. Number 6 and Zarek. How do they belong to our own story lines. Will Caprica heighten our uncertainties, query our concerns a bit further. Linking past and future. Still scratching my head about the Final Five. Pegasus, Colonial One, Cloud Nine. Are we all in need of kamala. Is it a drug, a mother (program) in Matrix. A word in one of the languages I don’t understand. Kamala, temples, labs, nuclear warheads and toasters. Emotions and rationality functioning side by side. Often interchangeable. Explosive. Unsecured. Confrontational allies in their perpetual mutual attraction. Poetry and algorithms debating differentiation.

86. A caustic substance

2009-03-20T19:09:00.012+08:00

Have you felt recently any rebellion against reason? Seen irrationalism peak here and there, either denials or blunt attacks, pronouncing intellectual stances null and void. That the mind is impotent, totally incapable of separating facts from fiction. Reality being nothing more than a delusion, even simple references to it ranked unfashionable, our thoughts hardly related to the world we think we live in. Forbidden to say that I am myself, for I’m not supposed to know who or what myself is. Or that a thing is a thing. Stuck in full-fledged inadmissibility, whatever knowledge I may claim deprived of a sound relationship to what my senses perceive. Everything in the realm of the hypothetical. For the function of thinking might not be to contribute to intelligibility, as I had initially thought.

I get so confused, my darlings.

I get so desperate at times.

I wish I could excel at epistemology. Explain what a cheap drama it is, this crisis made of beliefs. Opinions camouflaged, disguised as concepts not supposed to solve any problems. As if that could make sense. Oh, but yeah, making sense does assume existence, and since that can’t be proven, why bother.

I do get worried, you see. For you, your future.

Under the cover of philosophy and logic, many of our contemporary essayists, our thinkers, are developing a new religion. Articulating a mystique. Presenting their cryptic representational system as a rationale to renounce sanity. Caught in the fallacy where a mind that is said to be invalid still must be used to validate the invalidity in question.

A dominant need for the inscrutable, blanketing all with sophisticated forms of occultism. The impossibility to rely on oneself to perceive and understand. Denying, in fear, a status to knowledge. Denigration. Vilifying ontology, transforming it into articles of faith. Not texts, but incantations. Not arguments, but values. Evacuation of the notion of fact, my perception of the apple in my hand an expression of the abuse committed by the established social and moral order. Maybe. Maybe. Just a spectacle. An idiosyncratic impression. No apple there, but another opportunity to completely fool myself and confirm the eternal state of ignorance and helplessness linked to my human condition.

There is no longer a way, it is claimed, to deal with the meaningful. It is out. Uncool. Retrograde. A pastness. It is no longer there, in my field of vision, only a vision. Not there either, on the tip of my tongue. On the edge of my brain. Tested by my fingers on the paper. It is no longer accepted, received, welcomed. Or expected. I’m left with statements of repudiations. And it’s professed that’s all I have, all I’ll ever have. Told I must believe this. Accept that it is true even though truth is from now on an arbitrary something. A deep conviction, a warship of worship, I add.

Is someone saying, at this very moment, that I must be stupid beyond repair. A vulgar, stiff pragmatist.

Did I ever tell you the story behind my choice one day to be a bit schizoid, not that involved with people I mean. Maybe at this point I don’t really need to tell that story. It would just add oil unto a bonfire already well fed by contempt and allegations about physical forces. Despite despots, see, I do remain reasonable. And know what inflammable spells out for the reader. Sensory faculties may no longer be reliable, but our sense of duty should be.

Laolao

85. Congruence

2009-03-13T18:55:00.013+08:00

There are those, like Gödel, who have little faith in natural languages and who despair when faced with the lack of precision plaguing human communication. These ‘rectifiers’ may turn indeed to mathematics, sure that theorems have the potential to render mutual understanding perfect.

Maybe. Who am I anyway to question such endeavors.

As I said in my last post, I’m only preoccupied with meaning from the standpoint of curiosity. I’m interested in testing significance, in watching it emerge, looking forward to being surprised by the appearance of subtleties. I’m an observer, not a writer. I survey both frictions and relationships among words. I monitor activity at the paragraph level. Trends, drifts in the sounds suggested by letters.

Meaning, sooner or later, surfaces, defining its own message, purpose, effects. The mystery is never about content, it’s rather about the arrangement, layout, choices that lead to the presentation of substance.

I’m talking about beauty here.

For a mathematician, there is an irrefutable equivalency between beauty and truth. In seeking perfection, both beauty and truth are merged in the lines of an indubitable proof, for example. Non-dissociable from one another.

But letters do not function like digits, punctuation does not have the same type of responsibility as a set of scientific graphic symbols does. The alphabet is unconcerned with the dimension of truthfulness. The letter “A” has a wider and therefore vaguer potential than a “2” or a “9.” The pursuit of scientific truth requires an immediate and unconditional surrender to beauty as an infinite principle of unification, whereas words seek a panoply of possible veracities that can be generated using an explosive amount of resources. But both systems, I agree, are courageous in nature. Both overflow the edges of our mind, stretch beyond our brain cells to meet what is outside of us. And that would be the meaning of beauty, when contact is established with what is no longer our individuality, when we touch the outer layer of our skin and possibly everything else on that side.

For mathematics, it is utter objectivity. For the text, it can be said profound subjectivity. But ultimately, it is the same. Always a construction aimed at what is external in an effort to create ultimate acknowledgment, the highest form of knowledge. In that sense, truth is also a construction, a human statement. So what remains is beauty, which is neither a feeling nor a fabrication.

For science, what is true is thought to be beautiful. For poetry, nevertheless, bold truth can be perceived as ugly. What matters for literature is the presence of authenticity, a preoccupation with various types of accuracy, the analysis of metaphoric disguises and fugues. And that complex calculation often takes the form of seemingly undirected sounds and rhythms. It can materialize from the apparent abandonment of a method. From a supposed surface errancy. It may even give the false impression of improvisation. But all that time, it only seeks an encounter with beauty, the moment when all fits in its place and nowhere else.

Beauty is therefore the same for a philosopher as it is for a scientist. It is a perfect meeting of time and space, homogeneity. Two entities so identical that they are inseparable when superposed, existing as one. A moment when we realize the objects of our interest are exactly positioned the way and where they should be. This is the beauty of abstraction as found in mathematics and poetry. Amorphous, non-temporal. Scientists, thus, are as much estheticians as their literary counterparts. Poets as rational as mathematicians. And they're all realists. Carefully working at spotting beauty.

Laolao

84. With or without age

2009-03-10T19:37:00.011+08:00

I hold my own controversies as I sleep and dream about thinking.

Last night, I was acting as a kind of developmental biologist on the look out for time markers, examining speech and behavior to guess the age of populations. How old are you, really? This is what I asked in my dream. Arguing that we age at different rates, in different ways, different signs indicating the length of time one has lived.

Some of my teenage students being hardly more than five years old in maturity, others in their twenties branded by the distinctive nature of centenarians. Similar results, on might say, but it’s the path that perhaps matters, how we get to be who we are. And how long it has taken us.

Wondering whether a chronological perspective to human aging could correlate with how we feel about the past, what has elapsed, how light or heavy some days have appeared to us. The speed of minutes, the ones filled with happiness, others with pain or fear. How deep are such traces, and what do they reveal about our own personal duration.

Do biological signs translate the way we perceive the span of existence. Is there a reliable age-estimation procedure to render with accuracy the amplitude of life’s extent. What’s the best time scale. As I dream about thinking, questions take the appearance of people I’ve known.

My mother died without a wrinkle on her face. A cousin had completed all of her life cycles before the age of three, and a fatal car accident. A friend succumbing to the scorching fevers of AIDS, his 30-year old body consumed by a millennia of suffering. An adolescent having never known anything else than leukemia, dying with a serene, youthful smile in her father’s arms. But living creatures around us, many clutching to short ideas and overwhelming beliefs, unable to be light, incapable of bending, grayness in each glance, attached to arrested opinions about the world and themselves. I have met, quite recently actually, a 14 year-old who was no spring chicken, I tell you.

Age is a number. Yet, it is an approximation. It certainly indicates when I was manufactured, but it says little about my difficulties to become a mature individual. It reveals nothing about how embryonic my personality has remained throughout the years. It doesn’t explain why I still feel inexperienced, never quite ready. Filled with hesitation, still expecting to grow up and acquire problem-solving skills. Intuitively aware I’m unformed, unfinished. Still in the making. Anticipating the threshold of an upcoming birth as a start to the accumulation of valuable data on how to conduct myself.

How can I provide a full-proof answer, dispute what legal documents say about my age. Produce evidence of my unreadiness. Demonstrate that I’ve never outgrown the fetal stage. I’m not childish. On the contrary. I’ve never been a kid. All along, I’ve been rudimentary. On the edge of nascency. Displaying signs of potential. Announcing that I may have a future. Nothing infantile about my mind. It just never came to be, still preparing itself.

In my conversational dreams at night about thinking, I fantasize about being pensive. Becoming a thoughtful individual. Discussions where I’m wise and insightful, corroborating my biomarkers.

I dream I have a philosophy. That events have added up to lessons learned. Circumspection and judiciousness. That when I speak, sagacity can be heard. My dreams are that I am exactly my age. Talking in my sleep with discernment and balance. Showing, with insightful words, what more than half a century should sound like. I dream with perfection that I can handle decades of exposure to events, and then I wake up, still ill-equipped. Unpracticed. Unrecorded history as a relic. Things that can be as memories.

Can genomic studies disclose one’s true age. Can research into dreams create a dialogue worthy of time since one’s birth date. Can personal development be unveiled as much by the lines around the eyes as the ones spoken. Can these ever match.

Laolao

83. The onlooker

2009-03-08T13:24:00.008+08:00

I did a small collage yesterday. Had no idea, no plan, nothing except a need to rip magazine pages, to glue these uneven pieces to a wooden board, to look at what happens if organized content laid on a sheet of paper gets submitted to rupture and hapharzardness.

Had no message. I wasn’t communicating. I wasn’t inspired. I was simply curious. That’s the whole point. Not wanting anything more. No faith whatsoever in my own central themes. I do not have a mission, I do not have any information to share. I’m simply interested in the effects shreds of colored paper generate when randomly placed next to each other. Marveling at such occurrences. And I’m satisfied.

I tend to write with a similar approach. Words are always fragments torn from past sentences. Since their beginning, they’ve all often been part of a structure, invoked by authors to convey intentions, written down as elements of a line of thought destined to be read. All of them have been used in titles, paragraphs, stories, essays. They’ve all contributed to building logical compositions. Arranged on a page so to create sense. Bricks in the edifice of knowledge.

I look at a word, aware of its huge history, and wonder what it would look like if placed near another similarly potent. What sort of phonetic protuberance would I hear. What shape, slide, surge can be designed. A “k” next to an “s” or how vowels cope with each other. Where would breathing set its movements. Would the intake of air jerk or be mellowed down by some soft resonance. What would happen if the amount of syllables changed. Why do letters clash or melt, for they do have affinities, aversions, sometimes even indifference. I have little to do with their mood.

It doesn’t always matter what they mean, because eventually words, in an autonomous fashion, will draw their own significance from the way they relate to their own presence. There’s meaning out there, it’s everywhere, in the great depth of microcosm, mixed with all the punctuation that can be. It organizes itself along guidelines that escape premeditation, over which one has little influence. I’m just supposed to let it happen. As a hand on the keyboard. I’m simply trying this or that. Enlarging possibilities. The rest is what counts. And it is a master. I cannot teach it anything. It teaches itself. And I'm pleased, I’m the content onlooker.

Laolao

82. Lack of ambition

2009-03-06T13:32:00.026+08:00

Maybe my mind is not messier than that of others. I could be imagining my chaos, unaware the condition is shared across the board and therefore, a norm. A commonality characterizing the human specie. Our disorganized plans for fixing the universe being just that, an attribute of our typical thinking patterns.

Some would call it creative chaos, the superbness of complications: That mental untidiness, a paragon. Clutters and imagination considered good substitutes. Innovation and vision as degrees of disorder within a system. Artistry like a panic struggle against the forces of nature. Discrepancies always being the key to an idea. Incoherence inherently part of the act of designating everything under the Sun. And then losing the common thread that runs through us all.

I could have wrongly thought I was special, my muddles all over the place, stacks of unsolved and obsolete mysteries blocking the view, preventing me from looking, forging ahead. Believing I’m out of the ordinary, engulfed in chronically self-replicating pontifications seeking credibility through outrageous accumulation. The diabolical spirit of the collector surpassed by the mad amount of items to file, the breakdown spontaneously imminent. So many cross-references that the chart gets darkened beyond recognition and usability. I may have thought I was unique. A taint, a shameful expression of failure. Archiving under ‘deplorable’ the fact I always saw myself on the edges of blurry problems, never at the heart of clear solutions. Marginal and incapable of respected attainment.

Indeed, such a false perception may have been from the start the crux of the imbroglio. As I age, I see intense states of chaos often displayed around me as models of excellence. And I get more confused. In the words of many, I’m getting much better.

Improvements of the kind have never been part of my intent.

Have never belonged to my decisions, those duly recorded under menial beliefs in peace and quiet.

I will therefore decline the promotion.

laolao

81. Knots

2009-03-02T13:45:00.011+08:00

Looking at words in an unthinking way, free from avoidance or attraction. The unappreciated importance of the blank mind. No decline, no arousal, staying away from a task-oriented focus. Absent from the imperatives of cognitive performance. Just traces of letters on the screen, their contortions, the way they bend and their loops, knotted lines like entangled strings jostling one another. Significance tied up in the midst of complexities, unaccounted for twists and turns against the white indifference of a page.

No meaning yet. Only serpentines and nodules, a swelling of long strokes, threads and their crossings running after yet to be measured probabilities.

How many times must arcs overlap, swirling vortices, before they can be decrypted, before an observed distribution of knots starts to make sense?

Angular tumbling - kinetically unlimited; words buckling under the curvature of their length; multidimensional projections of both stiffness and flexibility; the brute-force of randomized paths; the agitation of possibilities: An extreme configuration of topological variants piled up right here, under my perplexed eyes.

So, I head straight for a knot theory.

laolao

80. A lunatic scenario

2009-02-27T20:06:00.020+08:00

There are days and there are nights. Times meant to measure one’s potential, the ability to reach the most efficient escape velocity. What it takes to break free from gravity, the seriousness of it all. Afraid to tumble back to Earth. Dreaming calculus equations, fantasizing new laws for mechanics. Words like atoms on an electrified grid. Joy discovered in prolonged periods of instantaneous accelerations. The mind’s kinetic energy behind the stars sparkling in a just now opened eye.

My daily thoughts as propellants. Providing thrust. Moving away from past atmospheres until memories start to sound counter-intuitive and then, infinitesimally small. Eventually missing, telescopically speaking.

In the morning, feelings equal to energy at infinity. Searching for a planet. Mapping one’s sentiments into empirical cosmic systems.

A slight light steadily plotting its course through heavens, predictive science filled with awe: To be finally found to have many moons.

But in my brain, amorphous solids, the recalculation of their mass turning up nothing, if not a lack of observational errors. Flawed competing theories sure something has gone amiss. My distance from the Sun, the absent term in the equation. A simple matter of finding one’s melting point, I think. Tons of material complexity, the topography of magma and craters finding its right degree of viscosity, molecules bored with bouncing around.

Yes, a life-time of numerical simulations has confirmed it: My world’s axial tilt has kept, after all, a steady angle. And that’s pure happiness: A tidally pulled habitability amid torsions of forces. So no need to theorize existence.

On the shadowy side of my satellites, there's an array of seasons getting ready for a surface area-to-volume ratio yet to be devised. It might only be algebra to some, but for others, it's the sheer brilliance of geometrical bodies, their molten interior like an inner pole star to steer by. A magnetic affinity granting levitation characteristics. Rings of dimensional analogs deflecting solar winds, a wondrous, albeit very technical way to remain stable against the wobbling nature of sublimation.

I have never encountered poetic fallacies, only scientific ones.

Laolao

79. Fireworks

2009-02-10T19:28:00.018+08:00

The Chinese New Year celebrations for 2009 have ended yesterday with the Lantern festival, closing 15 days of quasi-constant fireworks and firecrackers.

Despite the decade spent here, I remain an outsider, never quite integrated – this society still quite closed on itself when it comes to foreigners or laowais, and perhaps because of this, I feel a responsibility towards my role as a witness. In the margin of things, the distance compulsory, what I see, hear can possibly be registered with a perspective proximity would never allow.

I wait every year with great expectancy for the Spring Festival, looking forward to this monstrous display of noise and lights, deeply fascinated by the enormity of the spectacle, its duration, its overbearing insistence; in short, how it dominates everything from activities to sleep schedules.

There’s also a lot to say about the blatant contradictions the event brings to mind, at least for someone standing at the heart of this exuberance while never experiencing a true sense of belonging.

Chinese friends, colleagues, students, neighbors, acquaintances all have this in common: their general quietness, a surface docility often expressed by a marked tendency to agree too quickly and therefore, a propensity for a yes or positive attitude that is often confused, I think, with a sign of impeccable politeness. A calm I often, on my side, confuse with passivity. People who will rarely raise straightforward objections or even reveal their thoughts. Individuals with seemingly such a high respect for authority that, even when that authority is obviously and absolutely full of crap, it would take a genuine miracle for the entourage to verbally acknowledge the fact. People who appear to dislike risks. Who often invest major efforts in guaranteeing a so-called harmony, even if at great cost.

But then, here it is. Not the words. Not the sentences. No discourse. But an immense collective outburst. The orchestration of a grandiose chaos. A gigantic uproar. Fun from putting in immediate danger your limbs lighting up, with most of the time absent safety measures, millions of boxes of explosives manufactured in dreadful conditions by villagers who regularly blow themselves up during the fabrication process. Drunk guys in the middle of the roads triggering their blasts while cars veer to avoid catastrophes. Or running among boxes detonating in all directions, unpredictable eruptions of powerful burning gushes, flames rushing out at incredible velocities with a will-power of their own, an unbearable din rising over the city. Shocks sending tremors to the innermost parts of your being, the cacophony stretched for days, unrelenting, commanding.

Night after night, I walk through the streets, my camera ready, capturing the wild, the unbelievable, the daring. Catching with my lens a staggering collective operation. An endeavor made by thousands of explosions, adding to each other a forcefulness of the scariest dimensions. It is a matter of amount, this achievement. This unimaginable extravaganza. A question of numbers, of endless replications. A sudden communication of spasmodic grandeur. Of unthinkable proportions and decibels.

So, I want to write a poem. Verses for this unique moment of expression in humanity’s history: the deliberate and long-lasting arrangement of sounds and lights to produce an intensely intolerable context. A communication approach so loud, so visible in the night that only the bombs of warfare come close to matching that noise and its violent bursts, the infinite tempestuous blazes reflected on all things. A poem to ask why.

And I want my poem to be read silently, deciphered in the reader’s head while all the time exposed to the sight and the uproar of the fireworks. Like subtitles at the bottom of a movie screen. The juxtaposition of the quiet and the racket.

Scenes of repetitions, of persistence necessary for a glimpse at the amplitude involved here. A poem on images of sustained man-made violent eruptions. On the inescapable that is intrinsically linked to the nature of the phenomenon. Rhymes perhaps to underline the governing force of echoes characterizing each evening.

Words in an effort to render how much impressed I am every year. From the apparent peacefulness of an entire population to its thunderous skyrocketing manners. How amazed I feel, standing in the midst of a paroxysm. Caught by the magnitude of an auditory and visual outburst that blows away any preconceived idea on behavior I have. Left there, shaken by the persevering ferocity of the pyrotechnics. By the quantity. By the fierce rate of recurrences. Wondering what is being said, what’s the message. What’s behind the hysterics plastered all over the sky. What’s that communal endeavor, that stretched instant of ardent togetherness, detonations all over the place answering each other like long and loud shouts night after night. Moments of rumbling communion, flashes of self projected unto the darkness above, so many, so much, that midnight becomes as bright as day. The rumbling and crashes, what do they hide. On their mega-sound waves, what do they tell us. What part of life do they claim. What do such vociferous statements contain. This extensively loud collaborative ear-piercing happening, how deep does it run inside the soul. The mammoth flamboyance, what would its meaning be, what does it augur. What are its promises.

Not having the answers, I think a poem about questions (but without question marks) that could be shown against filmed scenes of fireworks like some thin filigree contrasting with the excessive turbulence on view could succeed in stating the scope of my puzzlement. Maybe. Maybe.

A moving collage of flares and blares with queries and a focus to test if it’s possible to make it louder, longer, brighter. To write directly on the material of time to see what happens next.

laolao

78. The unknown word

2009-01-08T20:40:00.039+08:00

In my twenties, because it was the overwhelming trend, I totally gave in to postmodern culture. Caved in, satisfying along the way the strong urgency that was mine to fully articulate an anti-establishment stance. To acquire, by the same occasion, difficult words to explain my posture in such a way as to seriously limit replies. It was a control technique, I admit, quite an efficient one at that, gifted as I was with the right kind of talent to carry such a philosophy through.

So, I went on and on about perpetual motions, change, the evanescence of reality, the impossibility to objectify, the illusions carried by our senses, the unreliability of perception, making mine the principle of uncertainty, everything shredded by critical theory, ultra-skepticism applied to one’s existence and consciousness, the prevalence of ambiguity in all attempts to communicate, an implosion of doubts about rationality. The deconstruction of language to inflate suspicions about meaning and rationality. It was all in there, forlorn.

An attitude undoing everything I had ever built to survive. Destroying, with a stubborn systemic approach, my much needed references to function as a social being. A sophisticated form of torture. Taking away the assurances I had developed to overcome the shortcomings that plagued me.

In short, I had ended up so much ‘against’ that I finally arrived at being against my own self. Throwing away my techniques and methodologies so useful when trying to pose as sane. Discarding with the help of a few cryptic concepts the efficiency of logic, the dependability of axioms, the very notion of truth. Claiming to be unsure (what a contradiction such a statement was…). Forcefully undermining basic assumptions about knowledge. Excited at the sight of inner confusion involving multiplicities of meanings suddenly appearing where I had worked so hard at imposing clarification, lost in webs, that errancy though viewed as a clear sign of intellectual prowess.

The problem was that I was not a thinker. Someone with the ability to separate one’s lifestyle from one’s thoughts. In me, they tended to be the same, cemented as I was in the foundations of the mind to see me through the trickiest challenges that can be. Mainly preoccupied by concreteness, strengthening the relationship binding words to things. My job in that respect being the constant rectification of my mental flaws. To suddenly claim those flaws as the avenue for salvation could only lead to an abrupt collapse. As it did, of course.

I had to stop writing. And had to leave, in a rush.

You see, pressing problems had to be solved. Hesitancy was eating me alive. I mean, if I’m to postulate that I do not perceive reality as it is, that I’m caught in its mere representation, in the inescapable mirror-effect of illusions, how is it possible for me or others to arrive at such a conclusion?

And to be so sure about it?

The statement itself begs to be examined. Do you see like I do the possibility of a heated debate at this point? After all, if I agree with the subjective quality of my perceptions, how can I detail my position without making a clear distinction between illusion and reality? Thus, asserting somewhere, somehow the existence of an objective reality. Can you guess where I’m going with this? Backward.

Also, a child could pinpoint the fallacy: If I know all is an illusion, that very awareness is also one, and it just nullified itself.

Last time I checked, two negatives made a positive. But three, that's a negative. Stuck again.

But lets pretend for an instant that it stands: If I’m never to know reality, what is it then that I know? That I can know?

If I must answer 'nothing' to that question, isn’t that answer by itself a knowledge, a piece of information? From an epistemological perspective, I’m in deep trouble. Again annihilating a statement the second I pronounce it.

It would still be a consciousness, what’s involved in the conclusion that consciousness does not exist, no? If I’m to doubt the very idea of existence, what can there be outside existence that’s able to come up with such a negation?

There are quite complex chains of arguments in the reasoning of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, even Derrida. Despite all my efforts at following these, I keep tumbling over the fact that our guys here do sound very sure of themselves, an attitude tampering with their views on the non-possibility of an absolute.

I was even willing at that point to accept that my neuroses and an intrinsic short-sightedness prevented me from appreciating to its full value the philosophical ballet I tried to be part of. For I really did try, with intensity, total faith, and it is exactly that attitude that drew me away from it. An indefectible faith leading me not to believe. Faith in not believing.

I read them all. Carefully. Hurt every time. Not understanding. Unable to make sense of ideas that claimed the senseless. Profoundly wounded I was. Crying. A vicious despair sucking my life away, nothing figurative. A pain grinding the mind and the body. Existential blood all over me. A brutish discourse attacking my entire being.

Not only had I not found answers, but questions questioned their own relevance by questioning and then denying their status as questions.

I had lost the bit of ground I had managed to acquire, been denied the joy, the pride of achievements, told to profess non-existence through the intellectually complex establishment of my non-consciousness. An arduous non-sensical performance. It took away the purpose of writing. Of course, it did. And I still wonder how these guys were able to keep on writing once language was identified as an oppression mechanism. Once metaphysics was deprived of its ability to carry significance. Once the possibility of something to know was shown not to exist.

Tired, my dear ones. Utterly exhausted.

Reason is what should help me make sense of the activity of my senses. What is it called when the process results in the opposite? Decades later, I’m still looking for the term. And I suspect only poetry can handle that word.

Laolao

77. All things real

2009-01-06T18:27:00.005+08:00

In intellectual detention. Still unable to say if I think at all. The gods in exile, replaced by a convoluted concept, that of confusion - the fanatical effort to explain a causeless aphasia. My native inner world always on the brink of the mind. Nothing but you, children and grandchildren, external to me. That I can love as an emotion as ancient as I am. You have been my legend, my total history. And I bend low to hear the heart of things. My shapeless voice, its uncanny wings deployed, quivering over the sand, swaying through a wild yellowed wind. A mental desert that wobbles every time I crouch close to matter to hear the heart of things. Losing a precarious balance, the dunes invariably reconfiguring disorder. But the love of you able to make it all the way outside, and unruffled. To see a beach and the sea. A pure white morning mist, the artful mantel of nearby hills like the ones in Matapedia. Stable venerable rocks calling over the tide. All things real. Preparing me as a child to one day have a child. I sat there alone, for hours, getting ready to hear the heart of things. Leaving the mind far away in the loops of strong accidental storms, my reasoning full of grainy, entangled filaments like the broken fabric of a flapping worn out flag no longer marking anything, but the long length of the past to come until you appear, and pull me into the world.

Laolao

76. Towards a new calendar

2008-12-31T14:57:00.001+08:00

And now in the quietness of your sleep, as you disappear within your own private realms, your eyes serenely shut to the resonance around you, I stay put, admiring the undulance of your colors, fathoming how the shades of your breathing can manage so easily to preside over all things seen and heard in a lifetime. Hues and overtones calmly resting at the tip of my sight in a perfect equilibrium with the world. That’s how the year ends, in a cozy hushed beauty. The curves of grace closing in on us. Loops of peaceful motifs like jewels of incalculable worth. Light and gentle. Their diaphanous thread pictured in the silence outlining your presence. And that of your journey to unseen parts of the calendar.

Laolao

75. At night

2008-12-30T13:36:00.010+08:00

Almost the end of the year. The one so many talked about, with the Beijing’s Olympics in it. But I’m happy to be elsewhere to close this bracket. To be with you in Shaanxi province, where the air in perhaps drier than in the Chinese capital, but also filled with dust and the remnants of burnt coal. It is crispy cold outside, unfortunately no snow to soften the view. Just sharp gushes of wind against dirty cement walls and sandy roads, huge ugly buildings sprouting disorderly like the sudden malformations of a pallid earth, with lots of wide new highways leading nowhere, blue veins designing tired paths on an old wan body. For a long time still, they will call such infrastructure and architectural disasters progress and wealth. These crooked hallucinations nurtured by one’s soul caring mostly for size and surfaces. It will take a generation or two to give a rightful name to this disagreeable abundance. And to fix it, I hope.

But as said, I’m happy to be here. Because you’re here too, my grandchildren, whispering into my ear at night, oblivious to how unlovely our surroundings become by the day.

In the darkness of the bedroom, I forget about defective urban planning, and monstrous ideas of grandeur. I focus on Lilliputian proportions until I can clearly see the shine of your laughter, your bellies giggling while your tiny feet climb on my back, your fingers diving into my white hair, the waves of the blankets carrying us through the stories and fairy tales populating your minds. And we hold hands all cuddled up on the mattress pretending we’re on a raft drifting away on an ocean of mini-dreams, treasured secrets carried by soft currents, winks, and utter fondness. We float and waltz in our hearts, navigating across the memories of the day, the games and clownish feats worth remembering above all.

For what else could there be in my opened palm, if not for your limpid voices dancing the night away? What is possible, but your joy to launch mine, the old and the young for a straightforward moment quite the same? What things, but uncomplicated, intelligible ones rising like a hymn, unaffected by tortuous quests for pomp and fashion? We’re only us, tittering with a kind of minuscule, but vital happiness in lieu of brainpower. Filling our senses with drops of pure laughter. Baby jokes for little irreplaceable thoughts. Miniature signs to escort us to moments of reveries. Scaled down fleece blankets to envelop and protect your dearest yearnings.

In a world of mad gigantic undertakings, we salute the infinitesimal beauty of your childhood, and the staccato sounds coming from the crisp bursts of enjoyment that I hear again and again, sparks crisscrossing an intuitive destiny as you roll and bounce over fluffy pillows.

It is the end of the year. And we enter another round of complicity. When more newly learnt words will appear every week to explore and outfit our relationships. Weaving a tighter canvas for our sails. More expressions to help us decipher all we are made of, tears and delight, questions and concerns, quests and responses. All things of interest. Our uncertainties and hesitations. As well as options and decisions. Words in varied, flexible languages forming extensions to codes of conduct for our heartbeats to follow as they mark the time we’ll keep spending together. Longer phrases to dispatch fuller vibrations along the lines of what’s communicable. Human beings attaching themselves to one another and practicing undoing knots and the dense entanglement of feelings.

The coming year like a possibility. A transferable exchange, punctuated by apprenticeship, a supply of untried comments, a flurry of designations suddenly pronounceable and offered, uninhibited. Regenerated ways to change once again what we want to say.

A year of creative perlocutions. Testing the extent of communication, its diverse manners. How bodies of words cope with the explanation of their meaning. How they structure a system to present unbounded sensations. And still manage to carry solicitude beyond an acquired eloquence.

A year to retrace all histories. Retelling the days, hoping to transform their events into shared experiences, translating oneness into support and cohesion. Stretched arms to receive companionship and unambiguous signals for much needed self-composure. A supple skin over the text of our awareness, dressing up narratives to safeguard and fortify their anatomy. Plenty of new words frolicking in our conversations mostly to wish us well, but also to patch up unsettled zones, the multiple versions of accounts that get confused when words appear to no longer be sufficient. When a verbatim report of what troubles us cannot properly render the accuracy of doubts. When stories and newly invented combinations disappoint, lacking in effervescence, the verve of our incomplete understanding difficult to morph.

We then need to move on, seek other movements within speech, articulate differently what is the same for all of us: to be at odds with the very syllables meant to give us a voice while we find it so hard to express what we've tried to comprehend about the world. A universal motion that always moves time forward into even more unknown territories. And it is to be there together, aware of being unprepared despite all our new words in so many languages, that we relentlessly talk to one another, forming a bond as if a net to catch the ideas that escape us. Helping the undisclosed to come full circle, and to reassert its own tacit nature, but now with much love and the sort of enlightened virtuosity we expect from truly benevolent intentions.

Happy new year,
Laolao

74. The costumes

2008-11-28T20:16:00.001+08:00

What am I doing? A princess dress and a prince suit. That I sew by hand. Layers of glittering ribbons, bows, plastic pearls, strands of beads, shiny frills and lace, it’s all there, accessories to prettification. Stitch by stitch, the movements of the needle waving their steady flow through the fabric. The thread with each millimeter holding the silk and the velvet together, juxtaposing colors, dream-like images for an enhanced unreal world. The glimmer on the edges of the costumes extending the flares of childish aspirations.

Haven’t been writing for a while, bent every evening on the sewing, my fingers pierced to their blood as if a new kind of ink was needed, a slow steady progression towards an extravagant accomplishment, a form of message made of luminescent textures: To offer you for Christmas the most outstanding clothes to play with. An opportunity to fully pretend. To dance barefoot while meters of satin and decorations float around you like the sails of a fancy ship. Like your own sphere of influence. Sparkling and ennobled by a game of make-believe.

Costumes to fully fantasize yourself, to simulate appearances, to fake your way through demands and life’s exigencies. For at age two and four, what better time to learn about ways to pervade atmospheres? Mastering the fine art of spectacles so to never become their innocent victim – lucid ones being ok I guess. Understanding the powerful nature of the theatre. Playing like dedicated actors, beyond the principles of fun, straight into roles molded after a dynamic textiled text recited with heart and ample gestures testing the seams.

Ornate fringes beaming with light to make you into funambulists able to cross dimensions of time still unheard of. A projection into a future better staged today in case later it never happens. Pulling towards immediacy all that can be, chiffon like vapors of visions adjusting their transparency to allow you to see everything you can conceive.

A gift with my hands. My ten fingers up and down rivers of ribbons, tracing with ornaments lines of whispers on the soft sands of fabric so that shimmering words, forever, remind you of the sound of water all around as you glide on the stage of youth. Swimming at the center of veils and streams of generous translucent jewels. Buoyant and confident. Fluid. Applauding yourself for the floatable spirit you choreograph amid skins of brocade imitation.

I am sewing night after night the allures of a new dramaturgy. The wide skirts and the gauze collars of new characters. The rhythm of new acts. The stellar apparition of untold stories for amphitheaters not yet built. For a public not yet born. For spotlights not yet switched on and for unpainted decors awaiting your steps. Your bodies clad in vertiginous offerings redrawing the meaning of performance. Always for others. Meters of lamé and precise needlepoint for the largesse of your souls. Bestowing on others your happiness. Costumes as a sign of vibrant donations. Abandoning yourself to the swing of attires blown by the breeze of a bright, merry audience. A gift so that in turn you may give. Luminosity for interpretations. Rays of enlightenment along rows of plissé golden strips. Songs for jazzy rainbows stitched on peau de soie, and the privilege to play a nonpareil part in this not-so-comical world. Just for the essence of kindness. And the many outfits it may disguise itself with.

Laolao

73. Copernican principle

2008-11-15T19:11:00.021+08:00

To measure unknown structures. The properties of scattered frictions, looking for signs of extra-universal matter, what stands beyond one’s cosmological horizon. Pushing, pulling all that’s observable under Heavens. Ready to rewrite the geometry of personal space. As well as all the models used to predict the expansion rate of inner life.

To measure acceleration, evolution, fate. Theoretical predilections against expectations. Endless consistency checks to calculate the curvatures of thoughts, outstanding intensity and the mind’s temperature. Also, the afterglow of educated guesses when we head for history.

Complex equations morphed into ideas orbiting the validity of conclusions. Measuring implications, suggestive data, simplifying assumptions. Gravity exerting its strength onto unphysical problems. Always the wrong solutions, called spirals, called anything but isotropic phenomena.

A cosmic background made of fluid ripples, because thinking sloshes about in the distance, its oscillations distorting energy distribution. The acoustic matter of our voices exploiting the repeated motions of suspicion, recording sensitivity as a mad velocity. Creating the impression that assessments and their parochial meanings, if we're lucky, can never lead to seismic topologies. But only to a place where we would be at the exocenter of our own world, shaking and changing on a stably ever growing map of ourselves.

To measure progress, hoping to count on the absence of improbable substitutions never meant to surround us. Holding the heart as a yardstick to weight the night sky above, with results that do not hold up. Applying what’s unexplainable to our understanding of ourselves, regardless of how untested virtues and principles are. The logic behind beliefs contrary to our absolute faith in unimpeded, uncharged electrons one day to be assembled so to form a smooth mirror for the much cherished unborn cogency that awaits us.

Trying to measure an immovable dogma seated in the brain. Consistently describing one’s position with the help of gargantuan words and evidence to support the visible part of unlikely future directions. Inscribing variations within the denser regions of feelings. Always busy showing off the infinitely homogeneous reflections of dreams, bigger than voids, looking for ways to clearly distinguish the funnel of imagined outcomes from doctrines we’ll never dare condemn.

Measuring to create the impression we always present gravitational solutions to earthly dramas, figures that cannot be retracted, surviving tests, proposing refinements to the philosophical implications of our journey, untroubled. Sure to reappear. Shifting around obscure sources of light like splashes across our language, overwhelmed by how fast we race towards the point in the universe we think is home.

A hard look at phenomenal constructions, those that can be viewed from all locations, chunks of ethereal matter there to make us feel special as we advance our revolutionary hypotheses over ravines.

To measure so to confirm longstanding notions about the current conditions of our emotional magnets, those tugged on the longstanding models of creation we must always invoke when referring to ourselves.

Detecting movements. Clumps of organic matter in which mental probes travel to find a proof that we are part of something larger than ourselves, of something happening at the same time than ourselves, all our dark flow looking forward to being evacuated from the universe we know, behind the new space where we’ve extended our faculties. Waiting for future laws of physics for our newly founded research, in a nod to desires and a presence right outside the outskirts of cosmic orthodoxy.

Measuring all that is being silenced, the scope of doubts, the depth of their constant insistence, how faint we appear as we speed up our nature’s expansion, our surveys of the full picture and of the not-so-convincing factors underlying the dynamics enveloping schedules of hope. Expecting any day now crucial information to cool down our ever-changing bodies before we reach our own intense centers. Forever folding our imagination over multiple points in space to verify origins unproven by science or by batteries of negative terms.

Nowadays so much in love with Copernican principles. Because it leaves us with an unknown about solitude, and with much explaining to do still, giving us time instead of space. Unceasingly recanting the finitude of a privileged position, thus keeping the door open to a flurry of soothing personal interpretations to better render our spiritual role as clever earthlings exerting communal influence over bright broad arguments that can color a few billion years of development.

Finding it impossible to remain undiscovered. Inadmissible to be precisely nowhere. Constantly needing coordinates to locate the particles of dust identity accumulates throughout epochs. Impossible to be an unfound entity, unacceptable this portion of a fraction dispersed in all directions. A depthless ocean for a ridicule cognitive anchor. Envisioning ways to visualize ourselves from a firm viewpoint. Concepts created to externalize how we may be regarded by stellar pollination.

Always looking for the pivot to all generational rotations, an elucidating middle point, an existence that would stand equidistant from all possible experiences, a compact core to our imponderable quest for a paradise other than the ones we relentlessly reinvent with every muscular contention about who we are.

Our intellectual ambitions would have been much simpler if the Sun had revolved around us.

Laolao

72. The water in the glass

2008-11-13T20:46:00.015+08:00

I guess every family has its own pitfalls. Children struggling with relative traumas, short or long stories of deprivation, various intensities of shadows shed by guilt, or a need to identify culprits and assign blame. Putting on show well-anchored souvenirs to support and explain today’s shortcomings and hang-ups. Most of us attached to a discourse whose main purpose is to communicate the idea of a uniqueness about some past pain. Competing for the privilege of having suffered more or differently than others. Our narratives reinforced by an urgency to justify the current state of our selfhood.

Being taught it’s all about attitudes and perception. Having to decide once and for all if we’re on the side of those who see the glass as half empty, or on the side of those who’ll say it’s half full. As if determining the pessimistic/optimistic nature of our emotional foundation could introduce changes in the quantity of water contained in the glass. As if the accuracy of the information that’s processed by our senses could depend on the words we select to render these mental impressions. Trying to convince ourselves that modifying vocabulary will suffice, that adapting our values so that they can run along a scale of lexical appreciation will allow us to bear quality judgments about reality. Trained at confusing words with what they’re supposed to stand for. At not listening to what we’re saying and the way we’re saying it. Thinking that a particular enunciation of our awareness shapes how we should feel about it, even molds it. Decisions to confer degrees of qualitative characteristics to our experiences, recording them through a specific language that has the mission of defining for the world our temperamental inclinations.

It has nothing to do with the water in the glass. On the contrary, it’s just another form of creative accounting, banking on hypothetical future earnings, on what does not exist, at least not yet, and may not even ever be. Considering potentialities as the assets we can now rely on. The benefits of the correct phraseology ready to service us in the present. Completely oblivious to the real amount of water available to quench our thirst.

Of course, no one escapes subjectivity. We’re always caught in instinctive maneuvers to worsen or embellish the facts, because our priorities and goals fluctuate with each new context. This is not what I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong. I’m referring here to the opinionated stance we are led to develop through our handling of terminology, so to meet expectations relative to the deployment of our personality.

For some the glass is half empty, for others it’s half full. Try to say, around the dinner table, it’s five ounces, and see what happens. Watch the faces. You’ve introduced imbalance. Created a vertiginous free fall. Inspired by a problematic glossary, you’ve positioned exchanges over an abyss. You’ve taken away from interlocutors the grounds conversations are built upon. They won’t know what to say next. Not because the data’s incorrect, but because it does not describe who you are in terms that can draw an image of your relationship to happiness or suffering. They’re not interested in evaluating the amount of water, they’re interested in evaluating you.

As they discuss their attitudes under the cover of the material world, they’re judging your politics. You’re readiness to accept the witchcraft befalling words, that which is able to transform your connection to people and things into a fictitious feature. The one you desire, positive or negative.

They cannot envision a relationship to the world that would be neither, outside this duality. That a link can materialize itself without your idiosyncrasy being dragged into it. Or, to be more exact, your idiosyncrasy being just that, a sustained effort at good diction.

I mean, if there’s one liter of water in the pitcher, the only evaluation that makes sense, the sole decision that has a purpose I can grasp and therefore can care about, both concern the question whether that quantity is sufficient for the number of guests present. Any statement about attitudes and perceptions, is the pitcher half empty or half full, is totally irrelevant.

This is why I’m awkward at conversations. Usually, I can’t stand their directions, the badly veiled hints aimed at revealing one’s condition without truly admitting doing so. Pretending to talk about this when in fact we’re talking about that. Predictable, limited, unsurprising, most of the time inevitable. And in the boredom I feel, the only light is the water begging to be measured. That is absolutely interesting. Like the entire day I spent as a child trying to count the number of drops that could fit inside a cup. Basically unable to count properly, but determined to solve the mystery. That’s something. Although hard to fit in a conversation.

If you have an expression about THE drop that makes the liquid overflow to refer to an incident that is just too much, THE thing that may catapult a situation into total disarray, you better know the precise number of drops that can lead you to this regrettable situation. And we should be talking about possible solutions, like getting in time a larger container. That’s a very stimulating discussion to have.

If one little drop can generate a catastrophe, isn’t it important to pick words appropriate to the nature of the danger?

I worked very hard at doing that, because I thought it was what needed to be done. And I went wrong. People rarely want to hear that. So, I guess, I’ll continue sounding like a fool. But I’ll keep on trying not to affirm the glass is half full or half empty. A serious matter of linguistics and ethics. And to those who may think that the approach sounds disincarnated, they reveal how little they know about poetry. A meaningful rhyme is like a geometry theorem. As beautiful, as logically structured and presented, as solid and eternal, as powerful and significant as a well-articulated demonstration.

Does that make any sense, have I erred beyond what's been said about me? My head so often described as half empty, therefore, I presume, half full?

But of what exactly, may I ask?
For I need the info to select the gauge.

Laolao

71. Poetical economy

2008-11-12T20:00:00.014+08:00

To wear with extraordinary panache the cloth of heresy. To reveal that long ago an event, outside the ranges of probabilities, has indeed led to the exhumation of an apocalypse about ourselves we had always thought unearthable. Testifying to the fact that innocence has indeed recoiled from any paradigm that threatened to infiltrate the forecasts we had meant to redesign for our own personal use. Protecting history from unlawful premonitions. Branding it as part of an epic disaster best forgotten.

As we came to embrace pretensions, recoiling from the ghosts of misfortune, our soul’s defenestration chose to fully advertise itself. Contemplating the fundamental soundness of precipices. The depictions of delusions and the mightiest tombstones we could conceive, while no one exuded alarm.

Instead, tyrants echoed, with rapt attention, the exact dimensions of our foolishness. Their technical questions combined to wisdom ready to gather wildly significant epigrams to support the wide distribution of ignorance. An ocean of supine orators, singled out for their dreadful brilliance, blinding the mutes. Our urge to capture censorious omniscience totally at stake. Liquidating ourselves by the same occasion, caught in flattery and suppositions, as we presumed we strongly believed in something. Always inclined to resent poetical adversaries, from time to time ditching the champions of semantic crashes, their willful evocations warning us against the very lack of ego put forth by the pregnant teachings of efficient and overly sane regulators. Epochal failures occupying every corner of fervent populist dreams of ascension.

We often bespeak disgrace. Quite occupied at embarrassing ourselves, the habitués of immunized memory, and the vast, vacant territories it dutifully neglects.

Poetry against funny popping bubbles, circular parallels drawn between our delirious state of mental prosperity and the complete terms of our surrender. Unlearning the misspelling of transparent shiny spherical voids into collections of highly quotable lifelong mistakes. Providing intense heat to controversies and histories ruffled by feathers dipped in lemon juice to write in a land where flames have never been seen.

Laolao

70. Reddish autumn language

2008-11-10T18:09:00.007+08:00

There’s something I’ve been wanting to convey, but I don’t seem to be doing it. I’ve looked at what I’ve written in the last two days. I agree with the facts and the way I’ve presented them in my two previous posts. I won’t argue with that. As I wrote, I cared about being accurate, circumscribed to the phases of my history as I think I experienced them. I tried to resist the temptation of looking at the past only from the point-of-view of affects, hoping for a balanced tone. A perspective made of more than one attempts at understanding events.

Yet, something’s missing. Like autumn leaves bound to fall, sentences eventually land on my screen. Not by choice, but because it is that time of the year.

On their way down to the text, they signify that their end is nearby, already started. They cascade to the ground where they’ll make a carpet of words to cover and hide the page and the soil. They’ll dress the shape of the earth, a blanket on the shoulders of matter.

Words descend, they don’t fly. They are the ephemeral part of the tree, the part able to detach, disconnect itself and tumble. Parts that can only have one direction: down. Leaves and words, piling up at our feet, able to disguise the land we must walk on. Obscuring a path maybe, or hiding the road from our view, covering landmarks, erasing footsteps. Even changing the landscape beyond recognition.

I can no more prevent words from separating themselves from their matrix or from falling, than the leaves of a tree can be stopped from throwing themselves downward.

As I look at the words now resting on the ground my page is, I wonder what’s under. What have I masked a leaf at a time? The panorama has changed. Amalgams of colored, textured words like an autumn tapestry concealing the territory that supports them. And I ask myself, what’s beneath? What could be rotting there, unseen? What is it that can decompose in the cold and damp darkness created by hundreds, thousands of fallen words? Would there be a stench, would I reach a gluey substrate if I shoveled my way beneath clusters of verbs and dead foliage? What kind of life form would be growing there, rising from the disintegration of flat, thin organic structures? From the quiet veins running through a collection of dead epidermis laid down, waiting to decay?

Once the words fall, their stem ruptured, loose, what other meanings appear, what kind of existence can develop from the molder, something the leaves do not control, do not even foresee?

What is it that I do not perceive and that could be happening below the surface of residues?

The writing stretches throughout the forest. Trees and branches depossessed of their most striking attributes, a quilt filled with words and on which I advance, walking on a duvet of fallen leaves, hearing as my promenade lasts the sounds, vowels and consonants, of crushed plant fragments marking my steps. Always deeper into shivering woods. The words carrying me, departed leaves finally put to rest as a floor for wanderings, cloaking the routes.

Peeling the many coats of leaves that cover the grounds of language, I must find what it is that germinates in the rich and humid murkiness created by what has left me, and has sank below myself.

Laolao

69. Humor and anger

2008-11-09T18:54:00.018+08:00

I still have lots to say about how I dealt with dyslexia. Please, bear with me.

It has been a long, lonely crusade, the one aimed at familiarizing myself with the process of learning. Had to understand it, its components, how the parts fit in the process, their sequence, their relative importance, the steps that could be skipped, the others fundamental. I had to decorticate to the smallest elements the advent of learning, how it manifested itself and how it could be verified.

Up to the moment I was told about the condition, I thought among other things that I had an eye problem. Of course I had realized as a child that what I saw on a page didn’t correspond to reality. I knew that from feedback. I knew, in other instances, that I was much slower than other kids. I also knew the results of what I did often failed to match expectations.

When I was in grade one my father had spent a few minutes at the dining room table – the only time he ever looked at my homework – to question me about what I was studying. He had gotten so mad, insulting me, throwing the sheet of paper away with disdain. He had said I was stupid.

I was taken aback. It was the first time I was hearing that word to describe who I was. I considered the word from all its angles, trying to figure out what my father had meant. I was puzzled. Not so much by the possibility of being stupid, but by the fact that the sheet of paper had directly led to the conclusion. I was looking at it in a deep effort to understand the link between my father’s verdict and the paper’s content. I felt it was essential for me to find that answer.

And I can say that everything after that incident has always revolved around the effort to find an adequate explanation: How does the relationship between what I do and stupidity manifests itself? How can I intervene to change it? How can I disrupt or alter this connection? That is where my answers were, I thought.

With time – we’re talking here of decades, not months or years – I realized there were two major kinds of pitfalls I had to watch for.

One, the most obvious mainly to others, had indeed to do with my eye. I don’t see things the way I should. This leads to writing a sentence, for example, and seeing only my intention, not what I actually wrote. The use of the wrong letters, the frequent repetition of the same words, the absence of key ones or of some syllables, the inversion of letters to form syllables, or writing the wrong letters, confusion between nouns and adjectives, the wrong spacing between words, syllables or letters, the arbitrary use of upper and lower cases even within words themselves, all of this had led me to believe my eyes could never be trusted. That was not such a bad statement to start my exploration of the problem.

Probably in those days, the late fifties and early sixties, dyslexia was much less known than it is today. Teachers, at least those I had, weren’t on the look out for the symptoms. Or perhaps these weren’t identified as precisely as they now are.

These difficulties that were mine, I later learned, are categorized as graphic problems typical of a specific type of dyslexia. They’re not hopeless. With intense care, constant self-discipline, they can be repaired. Not completely, but sufficiently. So instinctively, with much concentration, that’s the path I undertook to follow. Always trials and errors. Using my fingers to block out words, isolate some, going very slowly, checking seven times. By the way, that was my magic number when I was a child. I don’t know why I picked it. It seemed a big number. I had to check everything seven times. It was an obligation I had imposed on myself. Verifying the universe seven times. It sounded safe.

The second type of dyslexia I seemed to suffer from is of a more complex nature. It has to do with meaning. Even today, I find it difficult to describe the characteristics of this major flaw. It’s more ethereal. This deeper kind of problem goes beyond the challenge of reading and writing. In this case, speech and thinking are also affected.

The superficial type of dyslexia, if I can call it that, the one impairing written language, I understand it as the result of wrong connections in the mind, but because there are connections, they can be rerouted.

The deeper type of dyslexia is one of no-connections. There’s nothing to work with. It just ain’t there.

The meaning’s gone.

I guess this is how my “house of thoughts” as a kid came to be. Miraculously, I had found a dimension in my mind where meanings could exult. But I couldn’t export these meanings into the real world. But I knew meanings were there, in a leak-proof environment shut tight on itself, uncommunicative with the outside world. But it was there. As time went by, I became aware I was getting better and better at accessing this bubble. I simply hadn’t found a way to translate its content in a way that would have been acceptable to others and conducive to proper actions.

To be honest, I never came up with a satisfying solution. I developed instead a wide range of compromises, never a definitive fix. Little things. Pieces of recipes. Scraps of ideas to implement. A tiny something here, a bit there, a crumb of solution over there, a drop of this or of that. All combined, I could reassemble a passable meaning. Always partial, with holes, never as grand and beautiful as it should have been.

That has always made me sad. Believe me. Very sad. In some strange fashion, I can emotionally compare what I have written with how it should have been written even though I can’t reproduce that, and feel the inadequacies. How poor it is, effect-wise, from a reading perspective.

I now think that the crises of physical paralysis that plagued my childhood were, possibly, a sort of parody of what was happening in my mind. Was I unconsciously mimicking with my body how I felt inside my head? A prisoner. Unable to get out. Caught. My thoughts buried alive. Unheard. An urge to shout without a sound, a word willing to lend its support. Forever locked in a dark cave. All marvels untouchable.

I knew so well this was who I was. I knew it, and in more than one ways this was the worst of it. The fact that I knew.

I can thank anger though. Seems quite awful, I understand, to view violence, rage, hyper-negativity as being beneficial tools, but I see no others with the strength and the kind of lasting ramifications capable of effectively face in-depth distorted traits like mine.

It is the power of my anger, my daily anger, the anger I was feeling every minute of my life, which carried me. I was given only one intact ability, a single faculty as a weapon-tool: the one to be totally angry. I had to use it. I had nothing else that was concrete enough to last throughout the years I was going to need if I wanted to function. My anger, and only my anger allowed this.

Yes, my anger was going to persist. My anger had endurance. It was able to renew itself every morning, without signs of weakness. Whenever I would falter, anger wouldn’t. If I became tired, anger would force me to stay awake. It would keep me up and standing. It would push me forward if I ever became tempted by retreat. It would never let go of me. My only trustworthy ally. If I ever gave up, anger would hurt me, and hurt me, and hurt me until I completely surrendered to its influence, picking up my bruises and despair to continue the march. That’s what anger was going to do for me. And in exchange, I would be nourishing it. That was the deal, I might say.

In other words, I’m telling you that I am, as a person, an ode to anger.

I represent one of its achievements. I’m its product. The result of its vigor and character. Its unceasing stamina.

I would not be your mother or grand-mother if it wasn’t for that icy-cold unrefined anger. You would not exist if it hadn’t been there, years ago, to torture me. And then to compel me. I would not be there to tell you the story if it wasn’t for the persistence and stubbornness of sublime anger. That rage, it was everything to me. Bad and good. What I could acquire through it, and what it would cost me to use it. It’s all there in one package, the person I became.

One meaning I had no problem with, as you can see: Crude anger.

My statement here is quite indicative. It’s not a light statement. It contains the very essence of my biggest difficulties at the time. I could relate in those days to the meaning of the word anger, but I couldn’t lace a pair of shoes. I had no sense of direction either. I was clumsy at arithmetic, confusing the digits 3 and 8, 4 and 5, 6 and 9. Unable to add, subtract, multiply with a pencil, but good at mental arithmetic as long as it’s the noble, uncontaminated idea of three I’m dealing with, not three chairs, not three glasses of water. That is extremely hard to count for a person like me.

Even today when, before a class I must count the number of students present for our records, I can’t. Luckily professors have assistants in our school, and she does the count at my request. If she says there are 27 students in the classroom, I understand what 27 represents, but if I tried to count them myself, I would utterly get confused and mix the digits. I can say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in my head. But I cannot count real objects. Suddenly, I forget the order of the words signifying the digits. It becomes a real mess. My heartbeat goes wild. I sweat and panic. So, I use my fingers all the time for small quantities. And for larger ones, well… I’ll pretend it’s a waste of time or that I forgot to do the job.

Same goes for the alphabet. I would not even be able to tell you how many letters there are. I’ve learned it a million times. The info never stuck to me. I call these Teflon-data. They simply glide out of my brain as if they had never entered. I can now recite the alphabet correctly about once out of three or four trials. I almost always trip somewhere towards the end of the series of letters. Never at the beginning. But I know all my letters. I use them all the time. I just can’t remember their order that well. But that’s not so important anyway.

Want something even more ridiculous? At almost 56, if I need to tell a taxi driver to turn right or left, I must mentally ask myself which of my hands is the one used to hold a fork. That’s the right hand. The side not used for the fork, that’s the left one. But if I’m tired or preoccupied by something, I’ll say right when I mean left even if I use the trick. Shit. Do you know how much money and time I’ve wasted this way? I could hit myself whenever I realize, a fraction of a second too late, that the car’s heading in the wrong direction. But when I get it correctly, like a child I feel I’ve discovered an amazing thing. Every time. Beaming with pride.

I remember one afternoon when I was about six, I was late for the school bus that drove me back home everyday. It had left without me. My home was nearby. Only two streets away. Even though one can assume that I had done that itinerary many times by bus, I became petrified. I couldn’t get back home. I somehow know that I knew which way to go, but it wasn’t articulating itself. It wasn’t becoming an action. I couldn’t do it. There was a wall between the steps my legs could perform, and my knowledge of where I lived. I couldn’t send the information to my body and make it walk in any direction. I was lost. There was emptiness in the decision-making part of my mind. The needed data wasn’t arriving.

Understand what I’m saying. The information existed. But it was unmovable. It was refusing to circulate where it would have been useful to make a decision. I had a picture of my house in my mind. I knew what the street looked like. But the images didn’t not correspond to anything I could use to move. They were just floating in my mind, not linked to any practical process. I even had the name of my street in a corner of my head, but it was not plugged to anything workable in terms of solution. Least of all to the image of my street. You see, bits of information, it’s all there, but not linked. Not responding to each other.

I couldn’t either perform the steps to zip a coat. Instructions presented to me, which could be matched to something visible, that could be pictured for instance, were inoperative. But I was able to understand and phrase correctly abstract elements. Words that did not have an image attached to them. I was able to understand existential issues, philosophical concepts, mathematical ideas, because they did not require a physical representation as such. They had, so to give them an existence, an emotional or intellectual pattern I could easily recognize. Something abstract exists as a pure idea and that idea has a buzz to it that I can use to pinpoint it, differentiate it from another one. It’s an essence. It has an almost sentimental texture that defines it. I don’t need to picture it. It doesn’t have a body, a shape, a contour. You do not count an idea. It’s there as it is. I could live with that. I could understand. But if you showed me a book with pictures asking me to retrieve quickly the word for the object that’s depicted, most of the time I fucked up. My mind would go blank.

If you tried to teach me a series of steps to do something concrete, to act on substances, like an experiment in a lab, I became confused. I was unable to follow instructions that concerned tangible objects. There are things in the lab. Each of them unfortunately has a name I can’t access on the spot and all are accompanied by rules for their usage. So if I need to move these objects in a particular order, my mind becomes a mess. But the same experiment, at a strictly mental level, combining atoms into molecules from the point of view of their ideas, was an extremely easy task for me. I never made a mistake, as long as I kept the nomenclature abstract, in the realm of pure thoughts. Careful to never attach to it any form of visual representation. If I try to form an image of the molecule I’m juggling with in my mind, I’m as good as dead. My mental switch gets turned off. There’s nothing I can do.

Images are one thing. Words are another. Concepts go with words; images also go with words. But the three of them together, that’s a no-no. As long as I respect that, I’m fairly ok. But I didn’t figure that out in a day, let me tell you.

I can bring to the surface of my mind rather quickly a conceptual item, but I still struggle, even today, with simple stuff. I look at the banana in the fruit bowl on my table and I can feel the tension the exercise at recollecting its name requires. It’s just a little tension now. Not much, because of habits, of time. But I can still feel it crossing my mind, a slight pressure reminding me of the possibility, even if minimal, that I might screw up.

So, I used to get mixed up with words, writing the wrong ones for example. Or not knowing anymore after having said or written one what it meant. But if I kept it enclosed in my mind, it would do fine. Staring at something that I know I know, on the tip of my tongue it is, nothing coming. Even looking at something familiar, the syllables composing its name becoming unintelligible. Disconnected from the word itself. Just sounds with no meaning. And often not even the right sounds at that.

It is so scary, baby. So tragic. A profound fear. Because all that is known can thus be said to be absolutely unreliable. Terror when realizing nothing from your senses can be relied upon. Because the data, what you see, or don’t see, what you feel, understand, cannot be checked against reality. Even though it’s there, reality being in front of you, you don’t know what to do with it. You can’t sort it out. It’s there, but it’s the same as if it was absent.

One method I developed to compensate for my deficiencies was to fill the blanks with eclectic thoughts instead of fighting to try to get the word right.

If I can’t instantly put a word that I am sure of on an object, I’ll do literature around it. My guessing is quite good actually. I’ll embroider. I’m going to take these abstract notions I find easy to manipulate and pour them into the vacant spaces where something concrete and simple should have been. I can do that really fast. You’ll find me a bit weird true, or overly talkative, a fantasist maybe, a person with a colorful way of expressing herself, hard to follow perhaps, but you’ll get the general meaning (or not, it depends). But I don’t think you’ll conclude I’m sick. I’ll make sure that, together, we go around that peril. I’ll patch. I’ll take you high up in a swirl. I don’t think you’ll guess what I’m doing. You will not see, and that’s my priority, that an instant ago I was confronted with terrible huge blanks, and could not communicate something plain and concrete. So I take my sentences for the ride of their life. Up we go. Passing the time full blast until I’m sure you’ve lost track of what we’re supposed to be talking about. Because I for one do not know. So you’re coming with me.

It’s funny, really. Think of it as a good joke. No malice intended (or hardly none…).

I’m a good teacher. I want you to know that. I’m extremely careful, also patient with my students. I know more about how learning occurs than anyone I’ve ever met. I can identify obstacles and understand how these can be overcome. I not only teach my students the material to cover, but I also try to teach them how to learn it.

I guess you’re wondering how I manage my notes.

With colors. I use color pens and highlighters to make sure the words on the pages I use as a course plan stand out. I also use a panoply of different signs, codes, such as underlining, double underlining, circles around words, squares, or symbols like “x”, dots, slashes, dashes in different colors to separate various notions, words, groups of words. I write notes using different sizes of letters for different words so that they don’t overlap in my mind. To distinguish is the goal. My pages to anyone else but me look like incomprehensible drafts filled with scribbles and marks. But to me, it’s limpidity. It’s happiness, my dear.

And my notes are always as exhaustive as they can be. I can never take for granted that the simplest, most usual, casual word will appear in my mind all by itself, and exactly when it’s needed. It might, but it might not. Planning for the worst-case scenario, that’s me.

Any free time? For hours I recopy words, columns of words, hundreds of them. Practice. Practice. Copying attentively nouns, then verbs, then adjectives from a novel, any novel. Neat vertical rows of words, copied by hand, not on the computer, to strengthen the connection between gestures and lexical intention. For immediate proximity to the page. Endless practice. Everyday. Timelessness taking over. Tracing words, the mind empty, a bit zen I guess, focused on the movements of the hand, the trajectory of the pen, the lines drawn on the paper. An alphabetical yoga.

Oh, another thing, I make more mistakes, or mistakes with larger consequences, in my mother tongue than I do in English, I think. Perhaps because perfecting the language came consciously and at a more mature age, integrating as I worked at improving it the protection mechanisms I needed to safeguard the information. They’re part of the memorized sounds and words. They’re a parallel level activated as I speak or write, at least from the “meaning” perspective. I still do graphic mistakes, but much less about significance. Strange though.

Finaly, I'm an expert at a priori assumptions. To deduct. To infer. To postulate. That is so, so, so much better and safer than to observe... I hope somebody sees how hilarious this is for someone who invested so much in a scientific approach to problems, in the control of all imaginable variables, who believes something is sound only once it can be reproduced in an identical way with the same results. Preferably seven consecutive times before I think it's ok.

Laolao

68. The undisclosed

2008-11-08T15:12:00.035+08:00

I think it’s time. I must tell you something about myself that nobody knows, something I’ve always been extremely ashamed of. Something I’ve kept secret. You can’t start to understand the meaning of the word secret until you can fathom how deep and absolute mine has been until today.

Of course, any secret, even as protected and hidden as the one I had, manages at times to leave hints, traces of itself on the surface of the world, showing how impossible it is to control it in its entirety.

It has happened. Moments when I would realize after the fact, and too late, that outside of my will the secret had manifested itself, printing an indelible mark that could give its substance away. A dangerous clue with the potential to lead people to that secret.

If they added one plus one, they would get to two. I knew that. And I watched, powerless, with a terrible, heavy anxiety to see if anyone would do the math and figure out what I thought had no right to be said and known about me.

But I’m also full of contradictions. Acutely aware of them as if a gambler by nature, perhaps a part of me wanting others to find out. Playing with fire. Gradually becoming bolder. Testing. Liking probably the extreme fear that came along the game I ended up designing.

In short, I did everything that was humanly possible to lock up the secret, but I also exposed myself to the very environments that had what it took to uncover what I worked so hard at camouflaging. Masochism? I guess. In part at least. The other part being a strategy. Understanding quite early on that absolute denial and pretense would fail. I needed in order to reach my goal a certain balance between suppressing the content of the secret and developing a familiarity with it. Only then would an efficient exercise at control be achieved.

So, as indications of my secret popped up here and there despite my constant efforts to tame them, I also ventured further into areas where the risks of being discovered were great, thus forcing me to reinforce my hideout. This is how, oh irony, step by step, very slowly, I ended up one day completely living in the environment I feared the most.

You recall that I was told, as a teenager, that I would never be able to study. During my first and second hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward, I was submitted to extensive tests, psychological as well as neurological. A combination of problems was identified. They were not all explained to me. But some were.

I remember a doctor calling me to his office one afternoon, and calmly laying out the facts.

He did not really elaborate on the various diagnoses. He was more concerned by the fact that my parents had rejected what he had tried to tell them, categorically refusing to hear him out.

He offered me a solution: The hospital would, if I accepted, represent me in a legal request, since I was a minor, to put myself under the protection of the state, asking to be placed in a specialized institution or foster home able to deal with my condition.

I refused.

How would my life have been, what kind of person would I have become, who would I be today if I had said yes? I have no idea. Would it all have been easier? Worst? I can’t tell. But there hasn’t been a day since where I haven’t wondered about the possible outcomes of a different decision. I’ll never know.

They did not find any neurological causes, I was told, to my problems. They had been worried, among other things, that the purpura I had suffered from as a child could have left scars in the brain, but apparently it didn’t. Even more extensive tests done later in my life confirmed this.

Family history did not support either the hypothesis that my condition was genetic. I seemed to be the only one stuck with the problem.

At that point there were no other causes known but a psychological one to explain what was going on. Nevertheless, the team of specialists had concluded that the problems were incurable, too deep and severe to be reversed. With proper care, I would perhaps be able to learn how to cope with some of them, but never to the extent of allowing me a normal life.

I had an IQ well over 130, I was informed. My intelligence not put into question. My impediments having nothing to do with my comprehension.

Of course, some of what was said to me on that day was no surprise. My behavioral peculiarities were obvious. I had figured that much by myself. But the doctor added to that awareness the name of a serious handicap I hadn’t seen coming.

Up to that moment, I had not considered the symptoms as separate. Instinctively, I had always approached them as another expression of my screwed-up personality, meaning not as a distinct issue. So the news came as a real blow. Totally unexpected, and painful.

I was so profoundly dyslexic, it was explained to me, that even with coping mechanisms I would never be able to study. Had to give up the idea of even finishing high school unless I went to a special one for people like me. But to go to such an institution, I would have to be extracted from my family via a request for new legal guardians.

Remember, I said no.

I disliked my family. I didn’t reject the proposal out of affection for my parents or a longing for my siblings. No. I did it mainly because the opinion I had, at that time, of a family was so negative that this one or another, in my mind, would still be a source of conflicts. I had so little trust in adults that I couldn’t imagine other people to be any better or helpful than those I already knew.

For me, survival was the key issue. How does one protect oneself from strangers? Difficult. Whereas on familiar grounds, I thought I could better manage, I answered the doctor.

I had always been alone while struggling. I couldn’t conceive letting others in as participants. Intuitively, I perceived such an inclusion as a possible annoyance, with the potential even to become a danger to me. I faced an extremely intimate situation. There was no room anyway in there for another person.

Might as well go back, I thought, to an environment where the sum of my experiences could be relied upon as guidelines to sustain myself. Where I had some knowledge, defective maybe, - but that was much more desirable than none at all. That's what I said. It made sense. Among other things I was dyslexic, yes, but not dumb.

I also figured that being told my family, if I wanted to, could be eliminated from my life was in itself sufficient information. It would allow me to see myself “officially” as not truly belonging there, a card up my sleeve in case later it would be needed. I would go back there on my own free will, not because I had to or was forced to. That fact introduced an important difference. It gave me some kind of leverage.

Up to the minute when my father died, when my mother died, I have been thoroughly aware that I stood next to them only because I was the one who had decided to. Not them. It took away all their powers. When in the last moments of my mother’s life, as an example, everybody ran away, busy doing something else, I stood all by myself watching her die, and I was able to go through with it, unlike the rest of the family members, because I had consciously decided to. Not because of guilt. Not because she had no one else. Not because she wanted to or asked me to. But because I had had a long, long practice at making such decisions. It had started almost 30 years earlier, the day I was informed of my dyslexia.

Now, you’ll ask. How can a deep dyslexic become an avid reader and nourish dreams of becoming a writer? How can such a person be fascinated by languages other than the one already said to be impossible to fully handle for that person? Well, lets call it for now the funny part.

The truth is: This mystery lends itself quite well to an explanation. Be patient. I’ll come to that later. But the one that remains has to do with the secrecy others have also unilaterally woven around my condition. True, I never discussed it. But neither did my parents. Not once. Not even pronouncing in my presence the word itself. Not the slightest allusion ever. As if it did not exist. I don’t even think my sisters or relatives were made aware of my handicap. It’s as if my parents had never been told or had never realized the nature of my plight. That’s quite an accomplishment…

But the doctor did confirm he had met them to discuss the issue. He clearly said so. And he added they had reacted quite negatively. They had stormed out. Left. The only explanation I can think of is that when my parents understood the direction the specialist was heading for, they got scared and simply ran away, not hearing the rest. They only had, therefore, partial information. They didn’t give sufficient time to the doctor to fully detail the situation. And afterwards, they succeeded in erasing the few bits thrown at them. They never had a full measure of the context. So it was relatively easy for them to forget about it. Or pretend to. Or convince themselves it was something else.

My father being a psychologist probably made that possible. He had enough theoretical knowledge to twist whatever he didn’t want to recognize into something unrecognizable. Using his authority in the field, I can well imagine how he instantly developed counter-arguments to undo the damage made to his pride. And my mother might have been happy to position herself behind the tone of expertise my father must have displayed. And I gather he did so with a sort of desperate energy killing in the bud all potential for disagreements.

We’ll never know for sure how they succeeded in obliterating such crucial information about their eldest child.

But lets go back again to that day I was told I would never be able to study. Here’s something we can deal with.

For now, what I need to say is how I felt. It’s not going to take long. My feeling was so monolithic. No ambiguity about it whatsoever. A massive, non-equivocal emotional reaction: It was an imperious, commanding anger.

The type of anger no one should ever get to experience. So overwhelming that the odds of recovering from it were almost nil. An anger beyond measurability. I did not scream. I did not move. I did not protest. I did not argue. Why? Because it was impossible to express even a tiny portion of how I felt. That door could not be opened. The destructiveness of my feeling could not even for a single instant be doubted. An anger intensely immediate and eternal. Infinity. No boundaries. No limits. No end to it. An interminable depth. Anger like you cannot imagine.

Raw hatred and anger.

So large, so powerful that it had no target. Everything the universe is and can be was in my feeling. It englobed it all. A magnitude that left nothing out.

It could have totally consumed me, kill me as it later almost did. Or with its amazing violence destroy the course of the prognosis. But on that very day, I didn’t know yet which way sheer hatred and anger would go.

I was in that hospital to get help. Not to be told none was available. Not to be made aware at 15 years old that my hopes, my desires, my entire future were absolutely nothing.

I’m sitting in front of the doctor, and I fully understand that this idea of sending me to a special place is a palliative solution. Not a remedy. It would not make the problems disappear. He said so. On the contrary. It would confirm, cement them. It makes no sense. This is essentially an unacceptable situation. Dyslexia is an utterly unfair state of my affairs. No fuckin’ way. If I go down, the world comes down with me. That’s a promise. I swear to it.

My parents may chose to forgo their responsibility to help me, they may relinquish their status as capable caregivers, surrender their aspirations to act as decent people, but I won’t. I’m not letting this be. I’m gonna piss them off forever. That’s my decision. And EVERYBODY is wrong about me. This family or another family, no difference. And I hate all of you. I’ll beat you. I’ll bulldoze you. My anger is so formidable that none of you will resist its impact. I’m standing my ground, imbued with this gigantic anger, and I’m not letting any shred of it go. My parents walked away? Fine. I know where they live and that’s where I’m heading. And no one will stop me. And I’ll prove, a 100% proof, that all of you, without a single exception, you’re absolute assholes. I’m even ready to die if I’m sure it punishes you the way you deserve. If it annihilates you, your stupidity and selfishness. I will not let you free for one second. I will not let you spread your ineptitudes and idiocy. I, me, the impaired, the doomed, I will get you. I will win. I will devote until my last breath the totality of my hatred, of my anger at ascertaining my point. You will not live a quiet life, none of you, in the land of I-can-pretend-there’s-no-problem. You will never be relieved of my presence. You will die, and I will be there. When everyone else will have abandoned you, I will still be there. And you will look into my eyes, the last thing you see, and you will know.

This is exactly how I’m thinking in silence in that doctor’s office. A placid composure like a magnificent, brilliant and crazy strategy. Not a gesture out of place. Not a movement of my eyelid to betray the incredible mass of my plan. Wait until it hits all of you. I’ll level your world. I’m the one who prevails. Not your attitudes, not your decisions, not your attempts at running away. Look. Cuckoo… it’s me. You, fuckers.

Do you have any idea of how many schools I had gone to, ending up not going to school at all? My parents always playing the prima donna, carried by an inflated view of their importance, constantly blaming others. Two educated, wealthy adults ready to sacrifice me so not to admit I had learning disabilities. Categorically refusing even to discuss these, preserving a chimera about their image and competencies. I was so pissed.

Don’t let any of what I’m saying fool you though. That’s the secret I’m revealing today. I am still highly dyslexic. Every second of my life. If you pay very close attention, you’ll spot the signs of what, at times, I fail to master, what escapes my obsessive techniques at countering dreadful deficiencies. Or you’ll notice my tiredness. Because it’s exhausting beyond description to constantly be on guard against the very essence of my own brain.

Since I have never told anyone about my dyslexia, my children have never known about it either. Of course, they made fun of my weird ways of doing things at times, argued or joked about peculiarities, my “forgetfulness,” perhaps my absent-mindedness to account for mistakes. But it was friendly, kind. Never hinting at the presence of a more severe condition. In fact, no one ever realized the extent of my misery.

But I must say now how all those years I have been terrified to somehow transmit the problem to my kids. How I’ve carefully watched over them, extremely attentive for any sign that would have indicated that my disability was shared. Whenever my children at school had periods where they were either difficult students or exhibited behavior considered troublesome, I spent sleepless nights worrying about the possibility that they might too be dyslexic. I consulted. Went over the various criteria. Talked to teachers. Examined their assignments until I was sure whatever issue was at stake had nothing to do with what I had. In the light of my own condition, I thought (mistakenly maybe) that anything else was preferable. And could somehow be remedied.

Looking back, I was wrong not to tell anyone of the cause of my fear. But believe me, I honestly didn’t think I had a choice.

My daughter recently introduced me to a friend of hers. She had told me just before he arrived that this engineer was dyslexic. And it dawned on me. What? This can be said, just like that?

Through this anonymous post today I apologize to my children. And to everyone. Unable still to do it face-to-face though. I know I’m a coward. Unable yet to untangle the past and all the barriers I’ve set up.

Even in old age, I continue to feel that if I went about revealing the truth any other way than obliquely, all the systems I’ve built to function in society would crumble. And they would do so for one reason: If I were ever to pronounce the words, I know with certainty that I would cry, and would never stop crying after that, possibly harming everything and all relationships I’ve been able to build over the years.

From the bottom of my heart, from the place in me that is not stained by any ordeal, that remains genuine and purely translucent, where my love for you is the only thing that exists, I ask for your forgiveness.

To help you understand and accept, know that every collage I ever did, just to name that, has been an effort at honesty. In them, I disclose how I proceed to subdue my dyslexia. They all are a meticulous representation of a fairly effective methodology to thrive and be with you.

And, ironically, I’ve learned to appreciate the mistakes they contain in spite of my dedication to preventing such clues from appearing. This way I’m not a complete lie. And I can smile, a truly happy smile.

That's what art is all about, baby. The imperfections that resist and outlast paramount battles, asserting their rightful and meaningful place.

Laolao

67. Obama for non-Americans

2008-11-05T18:13:00.006+08:00

Haven’t written a lot in the past few weeks. We’ve seen each other often since the beginning of October, temporizing I guess the need to write. But I still want to mark today in a special way. You’ll tell me we’re not Americans and ask, maybe, why bother with the results of the US presidential election. Fair question.

Not only am I not an American, but I haven’t lived in North America for more than a decade. As for you, you were born in Asia and have a French father.

Nevertheless, I strongly feel we should celebrate Obama’s victory. At least, to make up for those who have no idea of what’s going on in this world.

None of my Chinese college students knew the election was today and when I mentioned the fact, none showed interest. As for my local colleagues, they went about their business and whenever they had free time, they shopped on the web. I tried to poke their curiosity and asked around for opinions. None came.

I’m at a Beijing Internet café right now. It’s almost empty. The girl at the table next to mine is chatting with friends on her computer. They’re discussing shopping, as far as I can see.

So, I’ll celebrate by myself writing to you, until later a few acquaintances join me to talk about politics.

You see, as a non-American, I am impressed by the ability of the US to produce deep transformations and to surprise us. At a time when criticism of that country’s policies – in foreign affairs as well as at the economic level – is raging, it manages to remind itself of the values it keeps saying it stands for despite actions and decisions that have highly contradicted that stand. It has the capacity, the flexibility to look at itself and to question its own trends. This is so rare.

For non-Americans, Obama doesn’t represent the final solution to the financial crisis, the war issue, or any major problem with consequences beyond that country’s borders. I don’t think anyone thinks that an election by itself can solve such complex issues. Obama inherits a chaotic situation and it might take years before stability is restored on so many fronts.

My amazement stands more on cultural grounds. Obama has an international identity. From a mixed Muslim-Christian background, with family roots in Africa, raised in Asia, educated in America, he reflects elements found in immigrants, in minorities. This polyvalence, this mirror image of so many communities channeled into one single man has succeeded in attracting a majority of American voters. This is where I’m astonished. There are not many places where this could happen.

When I look at you, my grandchildren, this is what I see. A globalization of the genes, of the cultures, of the origins and the places of belongings.

Your parents offered you a suitcase for your fourth birthday. Many would find it perhaps a ridiculous gift for such a small child. But you were so proud and happy, dragging the suitcase all over the house. Because you already know what it means to move, to change continents, to express yourself as you glide from one culture to another, adapting your behavior, and fitting in your values and beliefs inside a single suitcase in a way to lightly cross frontiers, bringing your ideas along to expose them to various settings, eventually bringing them back transformed wherever home is at a given time.

This man, this new American president, he’s a hint of what the future is becoming, more people like you embodying a multiplicity of emergences, blends and beginnings. An intelligence, in the sense of a sensitivity, woven from a diversity of threads. And we owe the Americans the pleasure of showing us such a person in a position of utter leadership.

This is a victory for you, my children and grandchildren. And the children after that. A recognition. The opposite of denial. It is a clear statement about who we are.

Whatever tomorrow holds, this has been done. It cannot be erased. And this is the day of our celebration. For all of us, fully alive strong entities made of nomadic fragments.

Laolao

66. Ageing

2008-10-25T16:10:00.011+08:00

I was right all along. Ageing would suit me fine. I knew that if I ever made it past 50, I’d be ok. I just had to wait, holding on to thin air whenever the world shook, hoping to make it through.

I disliked every minute of my youth. The pretty parts in particular, where being beautiful, appetizing is a precarious condition, where one’s yum-yum pulpy flesh and juvenescence represent a trap – years when the body is constantly tormented between the power of its attractiveness and the unsafe leverage it grants others.

I didn’t appreciate either the imperatives of performance young people often feel they must subject themselves to. Relationships at large used as opportunities to display forms of strength, imaginary and shallow. Building an intricate decorum for luminous fantasies about one’s competence. Portraits of hallucinated selves tested on easily impressed audiences out to seek clear-cut symbols and dazzling leaders.

I was there too, at times a public sucked inside the magic of well-articulated words, hypnotized by impressions of grandeur, a groupie aspiring to be noticed and loved by the future masters of major disciplines. Or, at other times, wanting to be one also, an icon venerated for its matchless pantomime accomplishments. Alternately, submissive or willful. Unsure of my place as if there were only two choices up for grabs. Able to mold myself for one or the other, both within my reach, but always tormented by the extreme posture that had to be left out: The quiet reassurance filling the follower, or the insatiable hunger of the ambitious. At a loss, incapable of deciding which stance was best for me.

I felt there was always something to prove, convinced being young was a long, uninterrupted test. With aptitudes to qualify for both models, I knew for sure I would flunk all life’s exams because I kept running from one end to the other, one day seeking the comfort worshipers are prone to feeling, the next setting my views on becoming a radiant monarch.

It was complicated. And I felt confused. More precisely, exhausted. Guilt from never fulfilling my potential (but which?) assailing my self-esteem. I didn’t have the flexibility to envision anything else between those two poles: that of the docile and gracious servant or that of the categorical commander. Pros and cons unfailingly flashing before my eyes, blinding the path.

It did happen at times, when the clash of these two radical tendencies became too tense, that I chose instead to obliterate the battleground itself: Me. Back then, it didn’t seem such a bad solution.

It took decades to outgrow the conflict. And only now can I say I feel fine. Standing outside. That’s what growing old has meant, leaving behind back-to-back directions and the narrowness of options.

It doesn’t mean though I’ve solved the issue. I simply learned to extract myself from it. Deep down, I still see beauty and intelligence as opposites, as examples of features that do not coexist on the same side, as states of Being that refuse to be simultaneous and can never intersect.

In theory, of course, one can say that what’s intelligent is beautiful. Or that beauty is always an expression of intelligence. We would find what’s stupid quite ugly, true. But it’s reducing the debate to a size that had to evict implications in order to be so small.

Beauty is fundamentally a competitive threat to intelligence. Not just perceived as such, but really one. Intelligence often gives itself the mandate to seek and uncover the menace, in a motion supported as much by fear than by a misconstrued fascination. Intelligence by definition is too smart to deny the danger. Much preferable to acknowledge it and then lay the claim of discovery unto it for control purposes. But beauty is, by definition, elusive, pushing intelligence further in its quest to identify and circumscribe it.

Beauty contains an unacceptable essence for intelligence. An unexplainable spirit, undiluted, escaping blueprints and templates. All the things that make beauty what it is cannot account for what it is. As in the beauty of mathematics, mathematicians can never succeed in rendering it in their equations, always an incalculable impalpable effect escaping the rows of signs, heading for infinity and the incomprehensibility of beauty’s existence.

Unacceptable for intelligence because brainpower implies constructions, reasoning, the manufacture of thoughts as objects to contemplate and/or manipulate as eventual decent substitutes to beauty. If intelligence ever were in a position to lay its hands on beauty, it would either disguise it through diminutives or altogether destroy it, replacing splendor with a splendid product.

So, beauty is a victim. Always. And on the run. The hunted and the hunter.

One has a choice of sides.

You’ll tell me that it does happen sometimes, a beautiful intelligent instance, event, object. Be careful of simulacra. Of superficial representations of ideals. Intelligence and beauty both as ultimate conditions involve their concretion in pain. If it doesn’t hurt to look at them, you’re staring at a simulation. I believe if both were to meet in a thing, the sight would be beyond endurance. And our eyes would melt.

As a young girl, sharp instincts told me that whenever I showed signs of beauty, I did put myself in great danger. In case intelligence roamed nearby, better bend, kowtow, lie low, a position of excessive submission meant to keep beauty out of the line of sight. To live in a subservient way so to never expose qualities. Finding in the movements of kneeling a form of peace and reassurance.

As a young girl, sharp instincts also told me that if I discarded beauty, elevating intelligence to its rightful position, I would have to run too, not away from this time, but always after something. An entire life of dissatisfaction and envy. Of frustrations, endlessly caught in one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Aggressive, because lost in illusions I would have to work so hard without never fully arriving. Destinations constantly moving away. Anger as engine. And only coldness to quiet the rage down, to prevent becoming a monster.

As you see, to be young was not easy. Had to wait for the potential for beauty and intelligence to wear off. I knew that under the influence of time such a disappearance would set me free.

Laolao

65. When we leave

2008-10-22T19:38:00.006+08:00

Haven’t written for a while. I’ve been quite busy at work with the fall term just starting. You’ve also visited me last week. My past days thus being overtaken by levels of activities that barely manage to fit in the 24 hours at my disposal every time I wake up. I’ve cut on sleep. It’s ok. The older I get, the less I need.

This thought crossed my mind this afternoon, and I must share it with you. Briefly, of course, I have to run. But perhaps by posting it now, like a reminder note, I can come back to it later and expound on its virtues.

When does history start? I asked myself the question and the hint for an answer showed up: History starts when we leave.

I like this idea.

I haven't forgotten. Tomorrow and Sunday, your birthdays. Four years old and two years old.

Much love, your Laolao

64. Diane

2008-10-12T19:27:00.013+08:00

In the late 50s and at the start of the 60s, my mother was helped by a rotation of maids. House cleaning duties became the responsibility of people that were more or less annexed to our family. One of them was barely 16, a bubbly small girl with an elastic body allowing her to stretch, bend, climb, making her quite efficient at her part-time job. Even when she pressed my father’s shirts, she wouldn’t stop moving, gliding on her feet as the steam puffed out of the burning iron.

We had no radio at home. No one ever listened to music. So Diane brought her own transistor that she would carry from room to room as she waltzed with rags meant to dust the furniture.

I had never seen anyone like her. She seemed always happy and so light, her feet hardly resting on the floor, moving and delicate, a weightless grace that kept me mesmerized. She also sang. She had a wealth of knowledge, like the lyrics of the songs playing all day on the radio. She would tell me who that was, Elvis Presley, or a band. She named the styles, that’s a twist. She knew them all. I was 11, realizing there was another world out there, wanting more than anything else to be part of it.

I had never heard rock 'n' roll before she worked for our family. It was instantaneous. The first measures rising out of the portable radio, and I was sold to it. It took me by the stomach, filled my lungs, an instinctive savage urge to join in, overwhelmed by my very own beat climbing along emotions I didn’t know I had until that acoustic moment. The sound loudly ringing in my head even after Diane had left the house to go back to her place.

I couldn’t believe it. Songs one after the other, for hours, day after day. How could there be so many? Where had I been as they had evolved, expanded to saturate the air to such an extent? Where had my parents been when these musical waves had amplified, taking over almost everything on radio? How come we didn’t know about this massive phenomenon? Was quite perplexed, to tell you the truth.

I couldn’t reconcile in my mind the fact that my mother and father spent much time and energy establishing their cultured persona, but had entirely missed not just on current musical trends, but on music as a whole. How could that be? Was it another sign that adults could be wrong as much about themselves than about the world?

Diane, in her elephant-bottom pants or her wide cotton skirt held by a shiny belt, was an angel. Effortlessly, she would stamp the steps of the newest dances, humming the melodies without dropping the laughter or her ingenuous grin.

The most surprising, I thought, was the interest she had in me. I mean, why did she bother explaining who was who, and what was what? Each of her ironing sessions was like a crash course in popular culture. She would share the rumors about flirts and love among stars, also giving me, as if it was contraband, magazines containing romantic stories like a comic book, but made with photographs of lascivious Italian women and their heroic virile boyfriends. Why the generosity? Not once condescending. Treating me as if I was her age, her friend. So unusual.

I had lots of time on my hands. I had been unable to finish primary school due to my "special circumstances" and stayed home all day with nothing to do except cutting catalogs. No care coming to the front. Diane never asked anything about this. She expressed herself as if I was a normal person. Took for granted I got the picture.

One afternoon, a real wonder: The announcement there’s an outdoor dance at her high school over the weekend. Do I want to go? Flabbergasted. Me? You mean, me? But I can’t dance, did I stutter, panic stricken.

Nothing was ever a problem for Diane. One, two, three, here we go. She’s holding my hand, pushing me to help me turn, and I follow, follow, follow. I’m made to dance. I get it. I understand. It's happening.

And on that Friday evening, I rocked 'n' rolled. Guys, their hair greasy cool, the forelock a bit long thrown backward, inviting me on the dance floor, kind enough to say they didn’t believe it was my first time. Was dark. I loved to be out so late. Timid lanterns around the yard. Music that kept coming. Everything was easy. This is how I wanted to live.

Was it a coincidence that soon after my parents took me for a car ride and happened to drive by a shoddy gas station on the other side of the river, mentioning while slowing down that Diane lived there with her large family, in the rundown wooden flat just above it?

Hi, Diane, I just whispered. Lucky you.

Laolao

63. The fourth level

2008-10-11T19:19:00.011+08:00

Again about learning. At 6, I couldn’t lace my shoes or zip my snowsuit. In front of the lockers in the basement of the school, the nun ridiculed me, and quite loudly may I say. Everyone heard. I hadn’t known I was expected to know how to do these things. I felt confused. How was I supposed to acquire such skills? And how had the others learned? It troubled me, thus forcing me, early on, to reflect upon learning.

Up to that moment when I was laughed at, I wasn’t aware that I didn’t know. Only then did I become conscious of my incompetence.

From a pedagogical perspective, reaching that second level is considered progress. For me, of course, it was just pain. But it did set a pattern. Not only didn’t I enjoy not knowing, but I disliked being made mindful of the fact. The first and second stages of learning weren’t therefore suited for me.

I thought of aiming for the third level where one is conscious of how competent he or she has become. Instinctively, though, it didn’t seem right. Such a step might induce bragging and a certain amount of showing off, meaning a form of relationship to people. Why? Simply because knowledge here is an extension, something you’re aware you’re accumulating and using. An appendix. An attachment, therefore visible, attracting attention. Like a nice bag you’re carrying. There’ll be somebody somewhere who, with envy, might go after it.

Much better, I thought, to target straight away the fourth level, a quieter one, where others leave you in peace, can ignore you, for you reach the rank of those who may no longer feel like talking about what they know: the level where you’ve stopped conjecturing about knowledge. No need to ponder upon how to get and then retain skills and understanding, because they have become part of you, they are who you are. And since people can’t distinguish what you know from you as a person, they may decide to leave you alone, perhaps not even notice you. And there’s nothing now they can take away.

You have absorbed. You can cross frontiers. No one will ever find anything in your luggage.

The key, did I think, was to become porous. I honestly believed that my house of thoughts could be the answer. A paradox, I know. Since it provided a perfect environment for in-depth learning, the fact it cancelled the experience allowed for endless acquisition while, at all times, leaving me unconscious.

This is why I kept using the house of thoughts as a child. Confident I had an unsurpassed formula to become the person I wanted to be.

I imagined knowledge not so much disappearing after having thrown myself into its breadth, but transformed and sucked up. I was a sponge-like material. Maybe after all I wasn’t forgetting, I was simply converting knowledge into a diffuse shapeless liquid drank by my pores. It was all there. I just couldn’t separate it from who I was. I was unconscious of my competence. That was it. The highest level learning can lead to.

Equipped with a satisfactory explanation, I not only felt more confident, but dared dream not just of becoming one day a writer, but a great one.

That makes you smile with commiseration? Me too.

Laolao

62. Bang

2008-10-09T18:52:00.020+08:00

As you’ve probably guessed, I’ve always been interested in learning. How it happens. Or why it doesn’t. Why sometimes it’s fast and why at some point it slows down. How come there are plateaus that can last quite a while and during which nothing seems to sink in. How do we know we've learned, and how do we measure that. How can we be sure.

Even questions on the nature of knowledge. The kind acquired through experience. The other by means of books. Some with the help of teachers. Are there differences. How is our personality affected. Is there ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ knowledge.

I needed answers. It was of vital importance that I understood the mechanisms of learning. I had to develop alternatives. Work around traps. Compensate.

I explained that I was taxed by learning difficulties. My survival, especially as a kid, depended upon a spotless lack of memory. I couldn’t give it up. I was entirely built around the principle of the fugitive, the ephemeral. A sieve. A conduit. Knowledge enters, I process it, understand it, play with it, and then it leaks through, continues on its tour of the world, caught by another mind.

You must try to see my point-of-view. My learning difficulties were not, as such, a symptom. A problem. They were the cure. They represented the treatment I imposed on myself. It was a decision. Having to make do with what I had at my disposal.

I decided very early on, in my own personal antiquity, to drive out information. It was a conscious move. I therefore had a built-in trigger that I activated. The valve opens up. All gets ejected from my brain. I’m the one operating that machine.

Only in states of profound disconnection am I controlled by a handicap. At the mercy of the rules in the house of thoughts. But when I'm in the world, walking in it, I pull the ropes. I erase. It’s my own doing. So well performed that it eventually became a second nature.

Want to know how it works? It just requires practice. I go “bang” in my head. I use emotions, make them hit the solar plexus. It’s a bit painful, yes, but instantaneous. It’s a blow, physical. An inner punch. I feel it. It hurts. And all that needs to be obliterated in my mind vanishes. No trace. Gone. Not even rewritten by the subconscious. Information that will never be recovered. I can relearn it all over again, and there will not be the slightest hint of déjà vu.

You think, I’m sure, it’s a drastic form of denial and self-defense. Of course, it can be. But I don’t always use the method for such venial purposes. I have more creativity than that. Give some credit to your laolao.

Imagine that the discovery of something fills you with an amazing and unique joy, an incredibly deep excitement. Almost euphoria as you grasp, elated, the beauty of what you’ve come across.

Wouldn’t you like to relive that moment again and again?

I can.

Sometimes I’m so transported by what I see that I desperately want the experience both to last and to stop. I go bang. The happiness so intense that it’s almost intolerable. So I go bang. And one day, I’ll revisit again that very marvel that’s able to lift me all the way to ecstatic levels. And I’ll go bang. On and on.

Imagine a movie that carries you to such heights. I can watch it anew as if I had never seen it. I have a pile of bangs. I know where they are. When I feel strong, ready, I pick a bang. Read or watch it again, aware there will soon be a moment of vertigo where I’ll go bang.

I’m not using figures of speech here. This is exactly how it happens. I‘m a scrubber. I’m a cleaner. I scour my mind all the time. Immaculate. It’s a matter of mental hygiene for me. No real choice. A sanitary approach to life. Disinfecting the ground for thoughts and feelings. Because they tend to rot if left in the brain too long.

Some decompose faster than others, contaminating the lot, even the kind of daily information you need to function normally. How to dress yourself. How and when to eat. How to behave in general situations. You start rocking your body back and forth, staring at a void, reacting to nothing, deprived of the most basic instincts as thoughts and feelings get imbedded in the mind, poisoning their surroundings.

Of course, I can’t afford that.

So I throw recently acquired knowledge down the garbage chute. Wash the mind with a flow of cold, crisp amnesia. Efficient.

In primary school, a problem I had was to separate information. Whenever my inner storage went bang, all the content disappeared. Not practical. That made me look like an idiot. An image I resented.

I had to learn to make boxes. To label them. Things to throw away. Things to keep. Useful. Absolutely needed.

I struggled with those subtleties for years, making mistakes. Not controlling my gift so well. By the time I was a teenager, things had gone from bad to worst. I had periods where fundamental distinctions seemed clear and obeyed me. But often, they didn’t. Unable to sort out the shambles. Stuck with data on Althusser, but at a loss on how to get from one point to another in the city. Wandering aimlessly, momentarily not knowing what to do, where to go. Even my speech functions affected. Shit.

It took a great deal of time to introduce some order. At least, to give an impression of order when, below the surface, there were still lots of confused items.

Basically, I had to understand how learning occurred. It’s process. Create solutions. True, had to wipe clean sections of the mind, but I also had the certainty that some of the stuff could be retained, reused. Built upon. That’s the part I didn’t know how to inact.

In other words, I was getting tired. In mathematics, for example, I could excel. But it was a strain every damned time to relearn from scratch. All I ever did in school in those days was from a blank slate. I had to reconstruct the whole environment. No previous knowledge as a base. Everything forgotten. Not a trace to rely upon. And I would go all the way back to the beginnings of the universe and retravel the path to where I should have been at that point. Tedious. Exhausting.

But I managed. A solution to a problem taught in class. Of course, out of my mind it went. So I would stare at the problem. New, because I couldn’t remember. And I would tell myself that I was capable of figuring it out. Just use your brain, would I order myself. Be logical. Deduct. You don’t need factual information. Just reason. And most of the time, I would pull through. Creating the solution out of thin air. Maybe not the right answer, but a well-developed rationale. And as I improved, I got away with it.

And then, I entered full-fledged adulthood. Much upgrades were called for. I needed a job. I couldn’t walk in an office not remembering where the coffee machine I had been seen using the day before was. Had to remember names of colleagues. That of my boss primarily. All sorts of little details that truly made you look like a fool if you'd missed.

God, did I work hard. Developing methods. Systems. Structures, and inner structures. Devising complex networks of reminders. Refining arrangements of elaborate cross-referencing techniques to cover as much as I could. Orderliness, planning, procedures. They were all there, stretched to the limit, operating at their full potential, never slackening. Absolute tension and focus. Tremendous attention given to the systematization of actions.

You have no idea how many procedure manuals I wrote in the companies I worked for. That’s the first thing I would do. They loved me for it. But I did it for myself. Developing update action plans. Methodologies for data input. Information quality control methodologies. Fact checking processes.

Evenings, nights at home writing cards, filling notebooks, indexing particulars. Even conceived exhaustive lexicons almost everywhere I went, because I couldn’t remember the words I needed. Translation dictionaries for the staff, my way of building tools to make up for my own deficiencies.

I was so precise, thorough, well-organized. An exemplary employee. Taking upon my shoulders the full mandate of improving EVERYTHING. Creating circles to review time and time again the same information. Expert at flow charts, diagrams, connecting all the dots on paper, tables filled with verified figures, columns and lists. I loved it. I had found my world, my place, my playground. Somewhere I could be, exist, as I was. Blooming. Operational. Extending ad infinitum my mnemonic instruments.

To classify is to think, wrote George Perec. Indeed. And I made it. I became a ‘knowledgeable’ professional. Even had fun at it. And one day, the bangs became not so much a necessity, but a hobby.

Laolao

61. House of thoughts

2008-10-08T20:08:00.014+08:00

As I reintegrate work after the holidays, what do I think about?

I coerce my mind. Forcing it to fit into details. All energies first plunging, then tightly packed into trivial activities such as making photocopies or updating students’ schedules. The strength of compactness. A necessary density not to leave any part of my being at bay, a part that would be leaping alone, detached.

Bringing the entire artillery to catch a fly, I know. All of me together, the wholeness of my components dragged along, for this is the rule: We abandon none of us. We stick together.

This is called focus, concentration. Amateur psychoanalysts would instead see, I’m well aware, retention and a fixation somewhere in one of the various possible degrees of an unsurmounted anal stage.

For me, this ability to invest one’s totality, even into what does not require such an intense input, is nothing more than having a point of convergence in lieu of mental wanderlust. An adequate voice to support a rallying cry that cannot be ignored. Concrete moments when inventories can accurately be drawn to ensure we’re all here, nothing gone missing.

And also, dear ones, it’s how I nursed myself, year after year, decade after decade. An extraordinary focus I’m quite proud of, I must admit, despite drawbacks.

Remember what I said earlier: I started out in life with a serious handicap. A strange illness with physical and behavioral symptoms that truly impaired my functionality. I was an ambulant disaster during childhood, and detonated with some delay during adolescence. Bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere. A real mess, destroying the quietude of denial anchored all around me. They hated me for the disturbance, but that’s another story.

You ask, why the delay? Well, because I could, to a certain extent, temporize the inevitable. I did it, even as a very young child, by magnifying concentration to extremes. Locking my body and feelings into a position of absolute availability for a task.

I became very good at it and can still, even to this day, with a wink petrify my entire being and push it as a block into a narrow channel of vision. It’s magic. It’s like taking a large sphere and making it fit into the hollow shape meant for a tiny square. I can do it.

In a state as dense as the one I’m describing here, there’s nothing I can’t understand or perform. Give me a hard problem. Something I know nothing about, and let me figure it out. Or let’s look at Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Or do we want an explanation of the proof that 1 + 1 = 2? I’ll manage it.

The problem is that outside that bubble of concentration, when I read myself back, the mathematical demonstration which was correct, or the austere post-modern philosophical essay, I don’t understand them anymore. It’s like reading the work of another person. I don’t even remember what the words or signs I used mean. But I’m sure I knew a minute ago. I juggled with them so well, I vouch for that. An in-depth perception. All gone now. Vanished. Even the souvenir itself of having written this or that. I can’t recall any of the details. Just a vague impression of having been there, in the text, in the problem, in the “house of thoughts” as I often used to call it. The place where I can go, but cannot sustain nor remember.

When I was hospitalized, they submitted me, and more than once, to extensive tests. At 16, the shrink explained that intellectually indeed there was nothing I couldn’t do. There was not a discipline in this world I could not understand if I tried, but only if I went into my “house of thoughts.” And that’s when he added I would never be able to study.

What can a girl do when faced with such a verdict? Learn to weave baskets?

Believe it or not, they did teach me. They were not baskets though. They were chairs. Weaving the seat and the back. And I was good at it. I pulled on the bulrush like crazy, the tightest weaving in the class. Resistant, undeformable chairs. The best.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight the diagnosis. I knew it was the right one.

I could not export my “house of thoughts” into the real world. I could not operate it in a normal context such as in a discussion because it was completely cut off from me.

As I told you, it was a place where I went. It was not a part of me. Some inner secret world. No. It was outside, but to be reached I had to cross all of what I was, all my depth. And it stood at the other end of me, over on the other side. It had a sort of address. Entering a space that had no connection to anything. Just waiting for me. Just there for me. And it could not be described. It had no visible appearance, although I would say it was perfectly smooth and neatly empty. None of the content I would develop in it could be translated into an audible format. Because once out of that “house of thoughts,” I could neither understand nor remember what I had done in it.

How did the “house” came to be?

At first, it was a game. I would let myself fall. Incredible inward distances. I had somehow discovered that I could write an assignment for school this way. I just couldn’t answer any questions about it afterward, that’s true. In my normal state, I was dumb. I could impeccably prepare an exam this way, but I failed completely in the classroom once in front of the questions. Knowledge had been left in my “house of thoughts.” Even if I could go back in the house during the exam, all had been erased the moment I had pulled out.

So I taught myself to stretch the house. Study an hour before exam time, just the main stuff, learn to walk, take the bus, enter the classroom without leaving the house of thoughts. This is exactly like being blind. You cannot be at two places at the same time. You’ve got to sacrifice one. So I did.

I would forget people’s names, my home phone number, how to simply chitchat, unable to carry on any distracting activity. I would walk in an affected way, almost a robot. Rigid. Eyes, the gaze weird. Way, way before I ever took drugs, my parents and school authorities thought I was constantly stoned, out of my head. And they would yell, threaten. But luckily, I couldn’t hear very well either. And I went on stretching my house of thoughts.

The issue with my house, I think, had to do with the air it encountered as I entered and left. Somehow there was a mental draft. A gush of wind that would shake my mind, and which grew bigger as I grew older. Eventually, I had a tornado between my two ears. What a plight. It razed everything. And I snapped.

The young girl who was admitted in a psychiatric ward, as an example, read books in her house of thoughts, but couldn’t remember afterward what they were about. Sometimes, not even the title or the author. But she had read with intensity every single word. She knew she had felt powerful emotions as she read. She was absolutely certain she had developed ideas and comments along the chapters she had gone through. She had no doubt about having understood implications. She had inferred. Analyzed. Decorticated the writing. But had totally forgotten. A perfect blank.

The house of thoughts grew. It helped to survive, yes, but its side effects were devastating. It came to a point where the blankness covered most of the things I did in a day. I had succeeded in extending it quite far, but at the same time it prevented me from having a natural behavior. I didn’t sit, I had a poise. Fabricated. Artificial. An aspect I had to give myself to try and resemble a person while I was busy elsewhere, in my house.

I had to write tons of notes to remember what I had done or said.

You have no idea how consuming maintaining the house in operation could be. Energy-wise. And no one can imagine how difficult it was to land back into the world for even a short appearance.

One day, I found I could no longer do it. An atrocious event happened.

That’s the day I crashed. And everybody just went: Oh my God, she’s soooo sick. Because I was shouting at the top of my lungs, and just couldn’t stop doing so.

You see, the most unexpected thing occurred. There had been something in my house of thoughts, a horrible thing. I had seen it, and had ran away at the speed of light. Finding security in the world of people. Suddenly, there had been a presence utterly hideous waiting for me in my house. I saw it twice. And both times, I screamed like hell, unstoppable. And went mad for months.

To this day, I still don’t know what was in the house.

I’ve built since other houses of thoughts. Much smaller ones. As said, lighter ones. Versatile ones. Adaptable to the imperatives of normal life. With many doors for fast escape. And I have also set up ways of, not remembering for I still can't, but retaining enough clues to reconstruct. But I never went back to my original house of thoughts. It’s been condemned. Buried. And that’s forever.

I talked about it with one of the doctors. He agreed. Better leave it closed. Some things should indeed be left where they are, as they are, and unremembered.

I’ve nevertheless kept a few habits. The main one, I still gather all of myself when I move among activities. I focus. Very important. All of me answering in unison: present.

What if I left a piece of myself behind, a little part of me careless and candidly free, enjoying a stroll, and suddenly whatever was in my house of thoughts showed up again, and grabbed it? Hey?

Laolao

60. A spell on grandma

2008-10-03T17:34:00.005+08:00

I’m returning to Beijing tomorrow. Ten days already, replenished by your light footsteps, the high notes of your voices, and of course laughter, the twittering that makes my heart dance. Tender hours contemplating how recreation unrolls itself, also the mess in the rooms after you’ve devised new games, your bodies leaping over the furniture, the vibrant animation of your spirits as they recreate themselves at every chance they get. Easily amazed, your minds astonished at the smallest events, noticing joyful details where one would least expect them. Your hands like a caress, open to escapades on the surface of the world around you. So much giggling resonating through spaces you widen, and strong hugs absorbed by my skin as you deploy happiness like a net to catch me. Erasing time. Days transformed into short minutes, never feeling the pressure of existence. Simply beaming, enthralled by the motion of your beings, little pioneers drawing the maps of new coasts so to gambol even further.

I’m sad when I realize I never could enjoy playtime with a similar intensity when my own children were of school age, preoccupied and busy with work, cleaning, cooking, the laundry. The single mother running around to meet deadlines, pay the rent, the groceries. Responsible for rules, studies, behavior, safety, health, transportation, extracurricular activities. Bosses’ demands. Long hours to make a living. Professional imponderables. Extended family neuroses and crises. The unexpected. Constantly suctioned. My body’s strength siphoned by a universe of appetites. Never enough. Daily dictates fully draining energies. Hardly any left at the end of the day to understand what pleasure and relaxation could involve. Beyond my grasp.

So it is a novelty, this adventure as a liberated grand-mother. Free to appreciate the charm of childhood. Treasuring the connection. A presence tailored for lighthearted moods. Myself available, your cheerfulness accessible. Brazen. No where to go but here, by your side, attending to your chuckles and frisky manners. My eyes on a swing propelled by winds of amusement, sweeping across your crystal clear shouts like when you spin and roll, bounce on the balcony, tousled and out of breath, your smiles as large as my joy to have seen you topple for fun, with bravery, a sense of achievement emanating as you wink at me, the accomplice.

In the long itinerary up to your births, there was often that hope. A moment that would come to be, where I would rest, contemplative and satisfied. Annulling trials and tribulations. A clean slate. Lapses of memory, only paying tribute to what’s in attendance. You and my children on their way to serendipity.

These past ten days have gone so fast. I will continue to hear the ripples of your glee once I’m back home. All my brain cells imbued with the brightness of your voices. As only luggage, your touch and jocular gentleness. And your sunny gaze. And your good natures. And, and.

Laolao

59. Expense accounts

2008-10-02T23:26:00.019+08:00

The crayons in your hands. Pretending to write. Or with colored chalk on the asphalt, drawing unintelligible, but pretty signs in neat rows as if leaving a note behind for nonchalant passers-by. You don’t sketch faces, objects. A flower, a fish, maybe a butterfly. You play at scribbling words.

Probably confused by the sight of unalike graphic languages, you compromise, outlining various simulacra of the alphabet adding exploded lines reminding the reader of Chinese characters. An osmosis of visual symbols, merging antipodes in your self-confident gestures. Finding no difficulty in inventing a way to unite the approaches of sounds and images into an outlandish written effort at communication.

I write too. And as I watch you have fun with make-believe sentences, I wonder about my own fiction.

Perhaps because I’m much older than you, I don’t possess the spontaneity you display with your writing tools. I find writing difficult. To be honest, I associate the act with a hard-to-endure form of sacrifice. As I select a word, I become acutely aware of all the others that are being excluded on account of this halt, the decisive moment when writing reflects the stop put to a search and its movements. A choice escorted by sadness. A discerning intuition about what is suddenly left out.

Conscious also that by opting for a language, I discard the possibilities carried by others. The rhythm of syllables in English shut out the resonance a thought might have in French or Mandarin. A voice that precludes other sounds. The idea now limited to one set of phonemes, the musicality bounded, evolving in the restricted area of a single grammar.

So this is what I like about writing: What comes before. Envisioning infinity. The silence as nothing yet is fixed. The waiting period, filled with alternatives. All of them available, interchangeable, frolicking with nuances and harmonic overtones. Slight connotations and variations. Gliding from one meaning to another, everything in that instant utterly feasible.

The minute a verb appears on the screen, it’s all finished. The vast spaces full of promises a moment ago shrink abruptly, now circumscribed to a few vowels and consonants, leaving out the other manners with which an idea could have been conveyed. Thoughts strangled, cemented. Incomplete without their variations, extensions belonging to their potentiality.

The typed word becomes a dry, lifeless choice. Disconnected from the tentacles of other expressions that once gave it the faculty to move and grow at an exponential rate.

I therefore always find what I write riveted, anchored. No longer able to envision the prodigious oceans intention came from. Writing as the narrowing of possible courses of actions. Picking just one. Sacrificing the lot to an isolationist decision. Filled with regrets for what remains unachieved.

It is what has not been said that stays interesting. The ways it could have been articulated. While unused alterations with their multifaceted substances drown fast into unexplored territories. Every time I write, I settle. And except for tiny pieces here and there, I disavow the maximum.

I know the unwritten as the place I’m not heading for. Turning my back. Landing unto the specific, thus eliminating the general and its wealth of undeveloped promises.

A writer in fact who doesn’t like written words. Have you ever heard of that? Somebody who thinks they’re never enough, torrents suspended, unattended to, fixated in forms so much smaller than those that were an instant ago abandoned. Expressiveness constantly elsewhere the minute lines appear on the white background. Blocking the light. Darkening the monitor. An entire translucence jeopardized. The implicit reduced to a few inferences. Heavy toll for a single chosen word.

Obviously not accepting so well that elements are privileged while others are not. Unease, the burden of choice. Finding unfair to name favorites. The amplitude of significance ostracized. Sorrow when sizing up repudiated vocabulary, combinations from now on deprived of a lifestyle.

Indeed for me, writing in essence is about annihilating, putting an end to revolving blends. Hereafter untold. Absent from the text.

So it can be a tragedy. That of what must be forgotten. Relegated to soundlessness. Butchering polyphony.

It is, it has already been explained, in the total moment of silence, when the conductor lifts his arm, when all the musicians are ready, the orchestra stoic, that all that is possible can exist. In the few seconds of instrumental muteness that the immense qualities of symphonies can expand beyond our limitations. It is in a withdrawn stillness that the words can reverberate their infinite depth. When the cadenza of possible pronunciations is still in a state of immeasurability, of endlessness, that all that can be written is alive. The untiring coalescence of phrases that have not yet been traced.

In the heartbeat before a word is laid down, there’s a universe of possibilities. And it is that very moment that I love. Whenever I claim a choice, I thoroughly feel the destruction it implies, an aftertaste of desolation ruining forethought. Obstructing the rest. The writer agonizing, forced to weight the losses. And accused.

I envy your fantasies. The invented words you draw on the sidewalk. Because they do not slaughter potential meaning. They do not have to renounce anything. Unaware of the need to immolate letters for the sake of a few written ones. Signs foreign to decisions. Simply flowing without having wiped out the world they originated in. Your illusive lexicon unfolding, never detrimental, not concealing a multitude of rejected arrangements and items. The marriage of sounds without exceptions or reservations still intact. Unconsumed. Yet wholly viable as long as there are no marked commitments. No favored term to invalidate the macrocosm containing all the odds. Your little hand able to render inexhaustible interpretations, leaving none stranded, no damage spotted in your tracks, no embodiments left behind in the path of writing. Not a soul forsaken. Just a game and no cost.

For years, I didn’t write. Now you know what it was I could not afford.

Laolao

58. Anthems

2008-10-01T13:43:00.016+08:00

Many would be gladly excited to remind me that I live in the land of censorship, not comfortably in their “free world.” I will not dispute that.

There are, indeed, a number of topics here I would not approach with a ten-foot pole. But not because of governmental edicts. I would not discuss anything with anyone, from China or elsewhere, related to nationalism, as an example, its blind fervor, particularly in times of extreme febrility, when an inflated pride, almost bursting, in one’s country obnubilates judgment. Reactions become then so dangerously emotional and violent. Some may want to die for ideas, but I find there’s no point in dying for the absence of ideas in others.

Nationalism and fascism can be intertwined so closely, it's hard at times to tell them apart. The phenomenon may weaken by itself, simply a momentary surge in self-importance inscribed in a history of defeat, shame, humiliation – objective or subjective. An intense sense of achievement quickly put into place to repair one’s image. And often soon enough the views of grandeur calm themselves down and are replaced by a more balanced frame of mind.

Or they don’t.

Instead, they may keep mushrooming, answering to a rough need for ferocity, the toxic pleasures stemming from a sadistic attitude. The shutdown of the cerebral cortex, only infantile impulses left to govern the body. Crowds gathering and chanting slogans, moved by a powerful feeling of collective oneness, where not a single individual remains standing up, thinking for him or herself. Waves of ready-made simplistic answers pushing the troops. An overwhelming craving for brutality in a disincarnated context, where no one feels responsible anymore. The thrills of hostility, the magnitude of monolithic beliefs in one’s durable supremacy. You cannot discuss with such people when they are carried by the strength of aggressive communal formulas. You first run, and then turn around and fight back. But you don’t discuss. That may come, but much later.

Of course, I’ve seen episodes of such behavior. Here, yes. Always bolstered by xenophobic fears, a huge susceptibility that can’t handle any type of contrariety. Where will it eventually lead, I don’t know. Perhaps part of a temporary adjustment. The ups and downs accompanying radical transitions. Whirlwinds of hesitations and alarm when faced with profound changes. So rapid that full-fledged adaptation is unrealistic within short time frames. In part supported by ignorance, other parts by a desire to flex and test one’s muscles. It might wear off, it might disappear with a bit of patience, sinking into a more stabilized vision of the environment.

And like I said, it might not.

But such demonstrations are not only typical of the Chinese. Nationalistic arrogance, being conceited, convinced of one’s eminence are quite widespread stances, even banal. You see them in so many places, expressed in so many ways. And in general, no one seems to mind.

So, when faced with such bolstered exhibitions, I keep quiet. I wait to see how events turn out, if they'll choose to repeat themselves in a quest for dominance. I practice a form of self-censorship, finding it useless to argue. But I make tons of mental notes. And I do put forward a cautious, attentive attitude, watching how sentiments unfold. Checking the pulse of thinking, quite worried when it wavers.

The censorship I’m confronted with here is almost always related to apprehensiveness about the outside world. Ingrained. Woven within a long tradition of failures to communicate adequately. Historically justified or not, that’s not the point. The past being what helps to understand causes, but not what can defend and support actual harmful positions.

I admit it: I watch my words, my examples, even quieting down information not to unnerve predispositions to escalate relationships into confrontations. What would be the purpose of moving on strictly emotional grounds, do I ask myself, for I would not be able to maintain the discussion on rational ones. Inevitable clashes would only reinforce feelings of persecution and misunderstanding, feeding anger and calls to redress an obviously deep-running inferiority complex. As mentioned, the issue is not to validate the present using bygone days, but to invoke antecedents to reconcile how one feels today with a sensible destination.

I had a similar position 35, 40 years ago when, in Quebec, fever ran high and independence movements grew into fervent activism. I deeply sympathized with much of the recriminations, finding that their roots were real and that problems needed to be addressed. But I didn’t go along with the mass euphoria, with interventions spurred by puffed up suspicion. Always a fear of what’s new, of the reasons triggering transformation. A society waking up, stunned at the presence of others. Afraid to be swallowed by the gigantic size of life outside its frontiers, beyond its language, surrounded on all sides by divergent viewpoints. Ways of doing things. Shocking beliefs hard to integrate into one’s structure.

So, when it was an imperative back home to only speak French, I went to an English-speaking school. Afraid I would be cornered into a narrow end if I followed the voice of the uniformed multitude. I required space, a tendency towards the miscellaneous. I wanted to confirm my ability to walk away. My aptitude at mixed messages. At the creation of a range of options. I could not stay in one place, mind-wise. I sought emergences. Escape in the form of variety, a surrounding where articulating one’s sense of identity didn’t matter so much and was replaced by identification to the immigrant’s search to counter his sense of lost in an unknown landscape. True, I related more to the newcomers’ struggle on an unfamiliar land than to the desire to hang on to everything that was known to my French catholic background.

About censorship, I knew it also back there, you see. Sanitizing my speech, getting rid of any homemade cultural references, not wanting to fall into senseless situations where I would be accused of treason. Dramatic societal betrayals, my back turned to the genuine and ‘legitimate’ desires of the population. A renegade among pure, faithful citizens adoring their homeland, a deserter, the heretic soul selling out its birthplace. Hideous and untrustworthy.

Thus, I was the teenager without heritage.

And I couldn’t speak my mind on either side of the fracture. Challengers to the French crusade often more short-sighted and dangerous. Replying with uncontrolled brutishness, incapable of empathy, staging ignorance at the forefront of their reactions.

(Self-)censorship is therefore nothing new to me. I cope with the one in China as I did in the sixties and seventies in Quebec. Quietly, waiting for the rage to pass. Evolving without discourse in the margins of popular movements. Hoping for the best as an initial position. Witnessing mutations and social spasms. The hiccups of civilizations as they grab each other’s throat. Weary even of the concept of dissidence. So many met, so-called insurgents, not so much critical of a system, but intoxicated by the prospect of power taken away from others, and falling into their own hands. Deliriously claiming to hold a better quality truth attesting to their unilateral right to rule.

That’s why I can live here and not suffer too much from the limitations put on speech. I find those everywhere. Cyclical. Attached to growing-up pains. As long as they don’t become the nerve center of all civil goals, I’ll just stand by and watch. Ready to move on, my own protest plan up my sleeve. For the fight must always be against stupidity, unassisted by national factors, if that can be.

Laolao

57. Like a rolling stone

2008-09-30T16:41:00.010+08:00

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

2008-09-27T23:53:00.010+08:00

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

2008-09-23T19:52:00.038+08:00

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

2008-09-22T20:39:00.017+08:00

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

2008-09-21T21:00:00.017+08:00

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

2008-09-20T16:10:00.016+08:00

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

2008-09-19T20:58:00.044+08:00

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

2008-09-16T19:15:00.047+08:00

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

2008-09-15T18:01:00.020+08:00

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

2008-09-13T20:09:00.028+08:00

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

2008-09-10T20:41:00.017+08:00

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

2008-09-08T18:03:00.004+08:00

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

2008-09-07T17:02:00.001+08:00

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