today

she does not turn her head back when she leaves...

... because she knows we will meet again.

we love till the end of day,
to renew come what may

she ends the day, with a consolation, a song of peace that binds together by a sacred score;
by chaste affections;
and tears of yesterday, hastily shed to slit history, mystery as to how she recovers, but gently they fall and we will remember (instead) the infinite conversation we have and forget...

...we are so bored together.

boredom is love.

In a kind of silence that keeps us in our places, steadfast and open to trust that we will always certainly love anew tomorrow, tomorrow that never comes.

so i will not ask for more (i will not ask to not ask for more),
but repeat our boredom everyday,
in crystallized blue, with floating orange cotton, split by the yellow of dusk
or
in grey sundays, with an arc of white divided, tap dancing on puddles of water
or
through green foilage, flanked by carefree beings, looking out into the reservoir

I do not turn my head away from her back until she disappears...

because we dream with our backs facing each other.

we are everywhere darling
we are

day 96

when the rose withers,
it will relieve you of its pain.
when the mirror reflects,
it will remind you of your gain.

we do not need to be afraid of our images,
we have to be afraid of our voices.

"I hate myself."
"I love myself."

I am myself.

day three hundred and forty four

the texts are escaping,
tautologies of meanings, disseminated, dissipated, precipitation that can be acidic or just bitter...bittersweet.
Texts of words, or gossips that fishmongers love. Or of love that saves fishermen.
lying at the bottom of the sea, or floating in the air
to hear.
words, sent, cannot return, saved in the inboxes of interpretation.
And yet, they have
meaning. Too much meaning. Safe in the knowledge that they can be read, understood and spread.
done, spellchecking.
We hear what we want to hear. And we speak what we want to speak; But.

done with the words. More words.
You have the impression of me as:
1. full of shit
2. backslider
3. flirt
4. selfish
5. weird
6. in my own world
7.

You're right. I am all those.
There is meaning in the words.

For we are all gods. Gods we fashioned ourselves into. Gods with a forsaken divinity.
We are made into gods. and gods we struggle to transmogrify - trans-mortify in our foreign bodies.

We, are just fellow gods, groping in the dark for our places - in altars, statues, monuments; passages.

Beneath the surfaces of our appearances,
we are just extremely silent. As faceless as God.


After blanks without words to fill,
we stare at our inability to express, our loneliness to ourselves.
i am lonely because I am.

I shall continue to be silent, as my little resistance to the many words we write and speak.
It is my ultimatum in which the fireworks will come as an aftermath of
-- my vendetta with I who killed me.

days 321

the words did not communicate. themselves themes of a narrative that did not belong to the passages written in time past, we arrive, in dying, what comes about through living, yesterday's non-arrival of what comes about, the prohibited words of words, then there is among us, a saying, about sayings that treasures the people who do not listen to themselves, always themselves, and we can work out more words to torment ourselves in writing - if not we can have meanings that because of meanings, we cannot foresee what will be read. Death, is then, the place we give to words to reside, rather badly at, when we have nothing else to say. And we move on. and on. with speech, the unfinished words of our stories, our laments and pass the judgments on others, the dark hair that completely hides the scars of tomorrow's words - they hurt, oh they hurt. Words are penknives.

"Fear", she said, "is the fear of fear that does not discloses herself, and is produced by nothing." (Blanchot)

We can love her. I said. And I realised how absurd that must have sounded. We'll do better to shut up. Yes, be infinitesimally small. And love will come to us in all trembling and quivers - from the sea, yes, the volcano eruption that rocks the spines of our bodies. We'll not stop loving. We'll learn to fear loving. And love is the fear that fears love does not love fear.

day 123

SUMMER_BED

MOUTHS, world-tongues, in the scissure of living: you leave
Dried wounds in my heart.
You leave.

Sun-reflection Void-face. up.
(Blind spots littering breath. BLOOD in splitter.
Soul forming rings, ready to burst into the sky.
Multiple fingers shadow, clamped - slit.)

MOUTHES, world-tongues,
living the scissure of living,
tongues tongues:

The summer-bed behind us both, the summer-bed.
Air on air,
rises high as imagination, we rise,
we rise and disappear as she imagines.

And rise:
We wiil be. We are.
We are separate flesh after the day.
Without the passages, pass-ages. Past pages.

- Paul Celan in retrospect

day 332

Two alternatives: either to make oneself infinitesimally small, or to be so. The former is perfection and hence inaction; the latter a beginning and therefore action.
These words were crossed out by Kafka.

That must be the third alternative. To perform erasure but to leave a trace. All the sudden one is able to fathom the infinite; the next possibility by negation; and immediately you can also make your words so insignificant that it hurts to hear your own silence thereafter. How is it that we have so much to say without being able to truly touch the hearts of yours and theirs? We talk an awful lot. We also write an awful lot. I think I should end my words after this full stop.

Another alternative: by letting linearity take its course. The future can be what it is supposed to be and there is absolutely nothing we can do that would allow us to ignore this certainty. I walk finitely towards that end of my human consciousness, eventually. That certainty is actually extremely settling. What unsettles me is that we can't simply say that there is a full stop and we just leave this human world in peace. Eternity, in my opinion is a more scary prospect. I constantly negotiate this trembling speculation with the certainty of my death and find myself in limbo, sometimes safe, sometimes weary, something scary. But all in all, I am at peace with my attempts to hail my own names into a myraid of performances that would die their multiple deaths and subvert, rather futile though, the certain end of my human life. What I am not at peace with is the call to eternity, whether it is eternal damnation or eternal glory, I am nonplussed by the limitation of choices. Perhaps, that is my free will: the prospect of erasing the boundaries of judgments with boundaries of erasure. We can certainly be uncertain because every law and word can be erased by a simple line - of faith.

I suppose that is what it means to erase. Faith. You erase what came before without allowing its full disappearance to occur. You keep in mind of your earlier mis-spelling, -writing and allow the negation (that is grace) to take over. I think that is why every human construct can be deconstructed via faith. It negates without letting go. It is not complacent. It is more than just Kierkegaardian either/or but a Kafkalesque negation. You don't forget the words entirely. You don't forget your laws entirely. You suspend the laws and you say:

It matters and it does not matter.
It's there and it's not there.
Of course, the negation is extremely prominent.
But there is an affect after erasure that makes possible the trace to push us forward towards eternity, and yet not quite there yet.
I wouldn't mind eternity. Repetition is impossible.

So don't tell me that I don't know love. It is precisely because I know love that is why I constantly die, with each negation of what I am.

I seriously think the straight linear line of faith is an extremely massive force.
Think about it and you will realise how deadly and sacrificial this love is.

You deny yourself that others may live.

The full stop is impossible because,
HEISCOMING

There are no full stops in Hebrew.
So the stop of stops we can think of is a term repetition, only that we now seem to forget,
how the voice of love and faith were, tainted very very by the images and bastards of today.

No more of more talking please please.
words of words fail us.

The comma is possible, because,
she is here,
in the present,

day 319

Why are we still talking? - Pessoa?

There seems to be a fear in us that compels us to repeat. However, we don't just repeat; we repeat with a difference. At every interval between a persona to the next (e.g. Alvin to Alvim), I often suspend my identity and find myself in a frivolous condition called anxiety by some. And that is when I am absolutely silent outwardly, but the rustle of language ensues within me. That is also when I speak in tongues. Only that, it is spoken within myself. You can't hear me.

If I pursue within myself the reason to speak in tongues within myself, it is really because I cannot speak properly outside. It is as if I have no proper voice which my alterity can manifest outwardly as. And I realise that this 'tongue' language, if spoken, only adds on as much as we feel as if it escapes. I can't take back my words. They fly up, and they fall in ears that may not necessarily understand them. Therefore, I choose not to speak in tongues, outwardly.

In part, because I fear that my words do not reach anywhere. To speak is not to repeat. It is exactly what that cannot be repeated. To speak out without reserve is really to confront myself and reveal the vulnerability of my identity and how ignorant I am with respect to my soul. I cannot understand myself if I should speak out. I cannot just say something and not hear myself speak. I am speaking and hearing myself speak at the same time. I cannot ignore the fact that I do not understand my tongue - this gibberish, foreign tongue that is not my own.

There is something more profound here when we speak about tongues. To speak in tongues, in the contemporary sense, or glossolalia, is really to not speak at all. It signifies nothing. It means nothing. It is, in a pure sense, a voice, devoid of actual meaning. It is difference in itself because it only flees and never comes back, even if you hear the trace of the voice. It is gibberish. Glossolalia is an empty speech. It is this strange voice that has no material addressee to whom the voice is spoken to. In fact, one wonders if this dialogue with one self could in anyway return back to us.

That is precisely its meaning - its reason for its existence. It alienates me.

For God's silence has left within us a void. A empty signified that in the Lacanian sense has to be replaced by the signifier that attempts to fly away from the stage that it came from. The stage, or the psyche cannot reconcile the fact that there is actually no voice from God that truly speaks in a voice (the God of Eden, the God on Mount Sinai, or Lord who spoke his sermon on the mount). It must then mirror (an empty image!) and simulate the presence of a voice. In this case, one believes that the spoken tongue came from the Spirit, the most silent of trinue God. One can then live in the comfort of his or her tongue that we can conjure up the spirit.

So in a sense, glossolalia does speak something: It speaks its silence in a noisy way. Each time I hear glossolalia, I hear silence. I hear the silence of God. I hear the noise that is ourselves trying desperately to mediate God and manifest Him in some material presence. Instead, why can't we find God in places more obvious and straightforward?

This empty signification has an even more profound reason for existence. It welcomes what is to come - the cutting of the tongues and the temple that will no longer exist; our corporeal presence that utters the human language will be replaced by light. For there is something about light (look straight at the burning sun) that makes possible a reading of glossolalia as utter nonsense. We do not have to remind ourselves, via our senseless tongues, that we have a spirit that dwells in us. Instead, it is nature that speak a language so profound and yet so simple that we always almost certainly miss hearing it. We dare not hear this language as much as we dare not stare at the face of this world that produces this language. Does a loud voice scream that the sun and the earth should move? (Instead, it silently blinds us if we should stare at the process of renewal and end of the day) We stare at an imperative that finds pleasure in the repetition of the day; the dawn or dusk of the day - ah! our existence to cease, repeated by the silent imperative. We cannot hear this imperative but there is no need to.

When we speak (our languages) we pretend that it comes from us. There is an egoistical projection in this human endeavour.
But when we gaze upon nature that repeats with or without your existence, we are humbled by the silent imperative.

So think again when you speak in tongues and Paul's warning that it only edifies yourself. One's own alterity is not encountered through an inward projection to the outside. That is a Narcissistic project. Our own alterity is encountered when we come face to face what we cannot face - the blinding light and lightning of God's glory and grace that makes possible a shift from a persecutor to the persecuted. And that also makes possible, the voice of God to reside in the mouthpieces of His children, with clarity and precision, dreamt, written and spoken.

This is Part 1 written by Alvina

day 327

I don't have a language of my own.

我不趁有过自己的语言。

Ich habe keine Sprache.

day 44

I have my bookshelf beside me.
Some books I will reopen.
Borges, for example.
I lie flat to read him.

I come back, incessantly to my bookshelf.
Some books remain closed.
Bible, usually.
I stand up and walk away.

It is easier for me to admit an error.
It is easier for me to admit ignorance.
The former allows me to master my humanity.
The latter allows me to be complacent.
There are a few principles I ignore.
There is a principle I adhere to - Ignorance.
So we can do well to move on, with life, and find ourselves return to exactly the same bookshelf, filled with dust and more books.
Did I read this yesterday or tomorrow?
Today, I'll go to some European country.
Today, I'll visit my hometown.
We'll do well to stay stationary, and life will come to you, with all the incessant noise and music.
So everyday, we just read and hear, the same old stories again and again.


I don't have a library at where I will go.
There is only one book there.

I lie flat in my grave, with no one to tell me my death tale.

day 36501

It has taken a century for Pessoa and I to meet.

Pessoa and I, with one another, along with those that came before and in between.

When I think of Pessoa, I think of proper names; biblical names that were changed with a performative. I think of Jacob then Israel. I think of Simon and Peter. I think of Saul and Paul.
I think of Alvin and my relation to him. I think of Pessoa and how inseparable we are ever since this belated meeting.

I do not know why it took so long for us to finally meet. And this inquiry into the heart of the matter will continue on for as long as it takes to find an answer. The inquiry will resurface at any random opportunity. I have no way of knowing when and how. He would not know as well.

Or perhaps, he knew.

If you are capable of knowing what the answer is, please send an early reply back.
We would like to know.

I think,

Alvin is the second best joke of Alvin.
(Pessoa is the best joke of Alvin.)

We will do well as friends. As long as we don't start writing letters to each other to declare our death wills.

We end up with an amalgam of proper names, dying and being born every century.

It's frankly very tiring to read us.

But I shall not be foolish to think I can become as important as Pessoa.

I preceded Pessoa.

Pessoa superceded me.

(Kierkegaard learns from Plato.)
And we will do well to acknowledge the signatures we signed on our own tombs. Then the distractions are complete. And we can don't bother with our names.

"The multiplicationof the (We) is a frequent phenomenon in cases of homosexual masturbation."

In that case, it's better to be alone. Even when we can never be alone.
Nancy will be there to warn us not to.
So our ultimatum to ourselves is that:
there will always be a post-us
that will haunt us.
So why bother?

It has taken a century for Pessoa to meet me.
And it will take another century for I to find us.

Goodbye Alvin.

Yours,
Alvina.

day 1313

trust to lose, then, the requiem will sound like a waltz
only then, then is a linear pull, to right where I am,
translated to the point of no return, and pushed by the cycle;
we are like bees, waltzing to reach the end of our Roman tanz

trust to be, between the punctuation of birth,
and the traces that my death disseminates;
we'll be songs to forget, lyrics to regret, either the end or the beginning,
we are like moths, falling from the light at night's dearth

being then, is the then that continues...presenting, present, in present, presents, by virtue of a present, the present of our presence.
yes, we can't say no to life, because life presents herself as such, the woman to die or live for.
Every little step we take, every kick we make (in the woman's womb), we live to be present.
We, the presents of our mothers, the gift that poisons our present.

Why don't we, instead of then, think of us as dancers of one minute waltz, that in one minute of our lives, we discover, to our astonishment, that there has never been a present - hence no past nor future - but only us, in the catacomb of presence; struggling to be, trembling to speak, reaching to hear, and dying to see; and we will do well to negotiate with the one-minute construct, that it does not take any time to kill us. We kill ourselves.

trust to kill, the eulogy turned into a dialogue,
only after, when people gather to listen to themselves,
we'll once again be books to be read, returning like bees to the honeycomb,
where we will once again perform the final epilogue.

I, dance to my death, so I may live.

day 113

The stupid things that we do,

sigh

Every stupid thing that we do.

smile,

For the most part, I used to think that being stupid, or at least, being ignorant was a cardinal sin that had to be atoned with a diligent study of ancient texts and contemporary theories. (That part still holds true when I'm not alert to my impulses.) The perfect reminder to our self-made importance is an already cliché statement - ignorance is bliss.

Of course, some self-consciousness of our own ignorance can only be achieved through a spell of profound edification from our daily exposure and experience, humbled by the very mundane unfolding of patterns, accidents and/or a combination of the two. In short, ignorance is not possible without some degree of knowledge - I know I am stupid.

To know how you are stupid begins knowledge, as much as knowledge begins ignorance. Never mind the genesis of things, but we will do really well to know that in exchange for bliss, this process of ongoing paradox must reach a kind of aporia - which is a simple bind that makes us thirst for more. Always a becoming, a knowing and not a Known or a Said. I think that's a wonderful concept. But I also know that I'm too stupid to fully understand what that means as a lived concept.

The truth is, we are dumb. The ways in which we do, inevitably, the stupid things we tell ourselves never to do. And not do, the things we tell ourselves to do. Or, we do bits of this and that, and not complete the task in its entirety and utter satisfaction. But again, we'll do well to acknowledge that.

Contrary to the opinion of condemning ignorance, we can still find some worth in our ignorance (we're definitely ignorant, some how or another). We can believe that our ignorance is in part a response to the unpredictability of our future. We can think how it feels like to live, in some blind and trembling way, how simple and terrifying it is, that we do not know. And perhaps, that allows us to have some better sense of our finitude, and thus, the people and things that matter to us.

So ignorance makes us feel - Love. It is love that does not allow us to thematize and philosophize. (Philosophy cannot talk about love, because it is already a love for wisdom and nothing else). It is to know that I'm so ignorant, I actually know that I will definitely do something stupid (and wrong) and still, with love, be forgiven for that ignorant act.

So it does not matter if we walk with a trip and in a blurred manner since we'll still get to somewhere. We can love with a blindness that does not repeat the moment of knowledge. We won't end up biting our tails - we'll leap out of the loop and pop like bubbles, safe in the knowledge of our ignorance that love takes care of things, of people, or a combination of the two.

So bear with your ignorance sometimes. It may just lead you to a bliss that cannot be defined.

Love,

day 222

to write against the grain, the brown coarse paper that makes my writing seems offensive, almost defiling it and never again shall brown coarse paper look and smell the same: a composite of black ink, paper and leather.

and we don't have the words to say, the letters to post, the hope to bring back and still we pretend we care, we do, such that we remind ourselves a past already forgotten, remembering to forget, as if the composite of memories can be conjured up by the imaginations of the present.

Our pens stop writing and the present stops producing the memories.

to not write is to stop the projection and to murder the day, which mornings welcome, and thus the man he could have been never did become. when we place memories at such transient pedestals, we only welcome the disaster and ruin of their beauty and bring forth the horizon, separating us and setting us down on opposite directions. do you remember? what you have written?

and we have obligations to life to be, such that no return is possible. Instead, we march so stubbornly, against life, against death towards the hope over the horizon, and fail to stop to admire the occasional rainbows that differentiate the otherwise gloomy and dark skies. maybe there is a return. maybe. the return to a place no one can imagine. this place is the present that man cannot stop, cannot understand but we can write about. After the memories come the writing of peace, of disaster, of death and the birth of newness and continuity. We can stop writing but we cannot stop reading. Reading memories, reading past joy and nicks of yesterday and making sense of present joy and nicks that fill up the illusionary us that we always fail to mark. We may not always know ourselves. But there is a pastness of us that we can imagine. there is an ancient quality to the grain of the paper, travelling its distance we cannot know, and landing in front of us to make sense out of it. The tree died to make possible the paper. We will die to make possible the future.

In Him I will trust.

day 111

she, an enigmatic figure, walked into my life, all flip-floppy and dragged herself, with half-witty and half-nonchalant responses.

is love an object? a pillow you hug?

she, a familiar face, a moon glowing and reflecting the light that whizzes her off, light years later and back, to the moment of chance and the encounter that make possible -love.

between possibility and necessity, I prefer just love. whether described as old as the hills or as strange as polarities, it is really just the trembling idea of how we love before we met.

So, do not forget, I, the vigilance that love demands.
do not forget, once apart now together, the thousand years that brought us here were sufficient to weave the possibility of love and soon close the narrative in an earthquake of death - we will meet again when we forget. when we do not remember each other again, we will love again.

is love a subject? I and you?

Love is the perpetual verb that makes possible the noun of eternity.

we, dragging each other, throw ourselves into this world, with half of us somewhere far away, as we split in atomic instances -

we love,

day 61

Two events demonstrate a theatricality that defies logic -

1. lightning struck the head of Merlion
2. Indonesian/Chinese Student stabbed Professor and leaped to his death

While it is easy to blame Nature and Construct as the driving forces behind the violence,
it is far more interesting and subversive to suggest that alterity (that is always apart from these categories) is the root of our miseries.

Either as symbolic order or as national imaginary -

you may defile the national construct by doing absolutely nothing and extreme effects will still be produced by virtue of what the national construct introduces as a staged entity that does not have to do much but vomit. That entity's passivity (as a statue of empty signification) invites a danger to itself (without being conscious of itself) and we know immediately without a lightning to highlight to us the lack of a brain even as it continues to vomit. This passivity is, really, also its alterity. It can do nothing but vomit. And it cannot swim and must perform without knowing it is performing, assuming eternity, the poor symbol for the tourist gaze and the mechanical reproduction of flash lights. In other words, without the set-up and staging of a passivity (being in a concrete park looking out into a mirror of its own construction by cranes and cement), it cannot be at the right place and the right time to get a haircut without asking for one. It must surely be bald and without its white mane. That is what signifies itself as wholly other. And this wholly other is its own danger.

OR, you defile the national imaginary by doing exactly what is assumed as a "problem with the student," who is internationally displaced but in any case the Master remains sovereign even if wounded. For such an isolated event is surely not common, where we can be safe in the knowledge that our mediation of the event (some students on campus rushed to snap [pictures] ) allows us to take a safe distance back and take [pictures] of blood and its aftermath; precisely because it is an aftermath, quickly disposed, quickly reported, and quickly forgotten by the members of the public who were equally quick to make a media out of it. What this suggests: If the merlion should die from nature's deathblow, we will be rushing to the scene to take [pictures] but as such it will be an indifference since the national is always capable of constructing new empty (hybridized signifieds).

What is truly violent about the above events is the aleatory nature of these events. As much as the National Construct/Imaginary can presuppose the safe infrastructure and harmony that its citizens, emigrants and others enjoy, occasionally isolating similar events as naturally news-worthy, any one such event can immediately cause a chain of unreported events that are in themselves a violent resistant to totalization and the general. The resistance takes on the form of passivity and indifference. I mean, why bother?

What we cannot determine is the Why-answer. We can merely present them as a performance (if we bother) of their inability to fit in - so much so that the Merlion may soon have to get a new hair cut (how nostalgic!) and perhaps even a new brain made up of lightning-resistant material. The logic of prevention and siege, or the mentality of constantly in trauma and crisis is seriously a fear of its own alterity - the irreconcilable difference within itself that must surely defy all classification of its supposed national identity. Nevertheless, we continue to fossilize some form of fused identities, devoid of a historicity that is rigourous and precise. (What is precise is the margins of its construction; of which I mean the wooden sticks framing the facade of so many buildings here) We also continue to assume that people of the same race, religion, ethnicity and language must surely be a community. Hence, it will end up doing violence to those who fail 'to be' the national imagined (or any of the above imaginaries), but at the same time, invite the aleatory forces to act almost instinctively and with scary precision the violence to the construct.


So we must surely learn the lesson inherent in the violent double act - the student stabbing Professor and himself - that there is always something we will never know, in each passing of the person that embodies the tension between alterity and theatricality OR the inward self-identification and the outward response to this inward projection. You may perform all your life but once violence is ultimately produced, it ceases to be a performance. It is a resistance. It is the resistance against totalization. We are intrinsically violent to ourselves as much as we love ourselves through performances.

A student - A master? It's time we leave dialectics where it belongs. It is really more productive to think how each passing of a thought process (e.g. a decision) manifested in an action is really the potential to be different from what is thought. It is violent and modifies immediately when it comes out of its shell and opens itself to the forces that surround it. I can die by nature. Or I can die by construct, by which we should really be weary of the violence that happens behind our backs (E Tu Construct!). The Nation is a honourable idea. It feeds and cares for its people. But the following events happened:

1. National Symbol stabbed by Nature.
2. Pedagogical Master stabbed by Diasporic Disciple who stabbed himself.

Already, we see how it is that we cannot thematize the tensions always at work.
Already, you see how I fail to be honourable to the above events.

day 72

Returning to the metaphors of theatre and the stage (if that is even possible),
'I' has a peculiar narrative to unfold - 'I' is not on stage.

What is excruciatingly painful about this narrative is the impossibility to be a fantastic performer of oneself. It is almost imperative that some form of mediation or medium- history books, journalism, statues and tombstones - must exist before a performance can unfold. Hence, 'I' in a paradoxical way has to be oneself without being oneself.

we can say what we want about 'I';
but even though 'I' can only be physically there on stage, 'I', the single one image-of-God does not know what it means to be an image-of-God; 'I' ends up in inverted commas, a restricted economy of totalizing the image that 'I' is.

I am - that is the infinite projection that does not return to oneself.

For I am - on stage but subsequently, I can be elsewhere. What then is my relation to the stage or the event that has passed? I am - performing but am I performing the pure image I can be or am I reflecting just another non-performance of myself eaten up as if the temporality and fleeting quality of my performance immediately separates me from my impossibility as a living being?

Here is another paradox - the impossibility of my being is precisely my possibility as a human being. And this comedy is not lost when I proceed to perform myself on stage - I must be, and in so doing, I stop being.

The great comedies almost always present this dilemma to us. We take ourselves too seriously, therein lies the comedy.

Perhaps, there is a more straightforward way of thinking this: if everything is performance, in that moment when we can speak of it as performance, we immediately displace it as such into thinking of it as a non-performance. Now, that is not very straightforward.
The tragedy of thinking that everything is performance is to lose the sense in which one can also be incompetent in performing or to be more precise, one is always in rehearsal. But then again, how do you perform non-performance? Surely, the greatest performance (I'm being ironic here) is our own deaths - jumping off building, drowning ourselves - in other words, the stage that is our performance space always have some part to play in our narrativising of our lives. They almost go hand in hand with the performer in providing the perfect ending. It is as if the physical world in which we by accident find ourselves in, provide exactly the resources for us to take our lives. But that is only in the realm of endings. I am interested in the non-performances of everyday life - how we labouriously drag ourselves on stages and perform with varying affects and effects of the self and 'I' in varying roles and responsibilities. Sometimes, they are unbearable to watch. Sometimes, they are so perfect that I cannot suspend my disbelief. It is because there are never good performances or some performances are over-committed to being a performance that makes possible my distinction of performance/non-performance.

Then in that case, Non-performance or the perpetual state of rehearsal of one self is another human narrativising. In fact, I have also restricted the event into a categorical entity in which one can begin to think about 'I'. I has much to say - but like the sun appearing/disappearing over the horizon, only a concept of linear time in cyclical repetition can tell us if it is an appearance or disappearance. In light of this, the non-performance of 'I' is really another performance. The difference, however, is that it almost never marks itself as a Said, a success of sorts; Instead, it is a saying, a doing, a performing, a becoming, being or even a being-unto-death, a process that must in time to come meet its eventual end. Without such a horizon of expectation, one will think one is performing extremely well. For the metaphor of 'Rehearsal' really presupposes that there is a final performance that we must rehearse for. The expectation to perform creates in us (in existential terms) an anxiety to perform, but in this case, we often perform badly and inappropriately. The way in which we struggle towards our own dying (as compared to killing) is really a comedy. A precision that leaves chance to mock us, as much as 'I' attempts to abolish chance. For within each death (taken as the extreme of perfect performances with the intended end), is a duality - a parody (of life) and a tragedy (of life) - simultaneously making us cry and laugh.

But there is also an ultimate non-performance that the performance of suicides exhibits later on - post event. It is that of the non-performance of self. One simply ceases to exist. (At least as a human being.)

But really, if we continue to think in terms of 'everything' with metaphors of performance, we really find ourselves in a loop leaping from performance to non-performance; an irony that is lost in us because we sometimes live the doctrine of performance so religiously.

There is something very straightforward in thinking of existence (or society, where this phenomenon is very prevalent in sociology and anthropology) and that is not by thinking that 'everything is a performance'. To make such a distinction is to immediately perform 'everything is a performance'. It is to only highlight what is already an articulation of existence in our own ways of existing. It is a performative that does not speak for existence. Instead, existence always has its own way to remind how bad performers we are, most capable in the surface of things. Our only saving grace, really, is our perfect performance of death (both as a non-performance that ends our performance, as well as bringing 'to die' its fulfillment.)

And here is the simple fact: We always fail in our attempts to will our deaths - Death is always an accident that must be in relation with the conditions of nature and man-made (our exteriority) most often indeterminable by us.

However, we will still succeed in dying once, eventually, without the need to do anything.
There is something in the inevitable relation between failure and success which makes living, though labourious and unbearable, bearable and so simple that it actually hurts our ego to know that living is simple. Simply put: we don't wish to know that death can take us by surprise. But the joke's on us.

"I am - not on stage" is an articulation of what this simple living means. It is the relation (the hyphen) that makes possible the articulation to even occur. In other words, the capacity to perform (or not) is not only determined by the self and our own absolute alterity, it is dependent exactly on the stage that we don't belong to; there is no stage for us after Eden. We have to create our own.

In other words, I almost always have to imagine the stage in which 'I' can come to fold, whether as a failure, a comedian, a clown or simply a competent actor of many roles. The radical thought that is proposed here is that it is the simplicity 'to live and die' that makes our little narrative of 'everything is performance' seems really trivial and almost a waste of time to think in those metaphors. Surely, we already know that. But what is radical in the simplistic understanding of 'everything is performance' is that we always fail to manifest 'everything' as a performance. We fail; Highly successful in utilizing the tools, rules and functions to manifest something, but never able to reach the core of 'everything', we only 'perform' the surface of things without the depth and profound understanding of 'I'.

How do I perform 'I'? That is a simple question. So simple that I cannot answer that. By way of escaping the question, I can only say how I intend to end this performance - by dying. (but this text then will only make sense posthumously.

Or perhaps, by asking what 'H' means - when I is in relation with another I.
It's not about the face. It's about the interface or hyphen that we helplessly find ourselves in; the stage that is not a stage but a being-in-relation-to-another and makes possible 'I' to be as 'I' is, in a state of immense simplicity - to live and to die - and without the baggage of performance and ultimately a success/failure narrative of our becoming - coming to death. Really, it's an ethical relation - both inwardly and outwardly without being unable to determine what constitute this tapestry of existence.

YHWH

But that performance or discourse is for another day.

day 82

I like to know what it means to like.
body, body and the souls in between that we cannot
see, along with the likeness of being someone else we fail
to recognise as intimately us
,
which this blindness burdens us with the unbearable weight of liking ourselves.

with the free prose, I traverse from the lightness of non-presence to -
the hyphen and a presence, enigmas that come before me,
I like - and that is the spectral liminal that escapes us,
and in liking myself, I also fail to see the hyphen
-
which this reminder now should also burden us with the bearable weight of liking words.

I like -
the heteronymy of words and marks that haunts and procreates the spectres and zombies of presence and absence
I like -
the cognitive capture that places a being in relation with anOther; hence, possibilities that a encounter posits.
I like -
You.

Choose:
the naked truth of being striped,
or
the covered truth of being sheltered

in this ostensible spectacle that is this world
I like -

I forget to like.