82. Lack of ambition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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