day 99

It is always an unnerving experience to be in a foreign land. The truth is, beyond the exoticism and eroticism of the unexpected and strange world when the familiar clashes and interacts with the unfamiliar, I know for sure I don't exactly belong.

Whether it is the way I utter or make a sound, or simply the colour and physical traits of a face that stands out like a sore thumb, I am highly conscious of my displacement and difference.

The reality is that I don't just exoticise my surroundings with my tourist phallic gaze (my camera is perpetually hung around my neck, thus it perturbs out from my chest like a masculine symbol), I recede away and hide behind my heavily exposed yellow skin. Of course, this is my imagination. But when imaginations clash, the result is often one of quick judgement.

Which makes me wonder: why so? Why must I be highly conscious of this difference, when it is a priori the condition of humanity. The troublesome aspect of this thesis is that I just end up universalising difference as a pre-condition of experience.

Let us take a step back - what un-nerves me the most is actually my familiarity - the fact that I always feel like I'm back to the combined experience of being somewhere familiar and unfamiliar. But we can't really take a step back. I encounter the strange and uncanny similiarity of buildings, food, shopping malls and even nature (hills, mountains, streams, lakes and seas). What I confront is more than difference, it is the engulfing sensation of a world I don't belong by feeling very belonged.

We cannot just escape by way of the exotic and/or the familiar. The threshold of comfort or discomfort attends to us like a IV drip that fills us as much as we exhausts it of its nourishment. It pokes and penetrates us as much as it heals us. There is always that great spiral, where the exhaustion of one is the extension of another. But suggested in this theatre of repetition, is really the compulsion to belong, to do and to belong.

I think I have to stop consuming myself, as a way of being less the embodiment of my misgivings, misfortune of being different, etc., etc..

Being different, or being the lightning that strikes the tower of universalism, there is a profound engagement and intimacy with ourselves and others, even if done in passing. Nothing you do will be right - therein are the complications of binaries of success and failure. But it is the relentless forwarding of a step taken, traces no doubt, that should humble us and chastise us to the point of kneeling at the point of exhaustion. Whatever you do, you will still fail as an immortal being. What being different demands of us, if we truly know what it means to be different, is that we perpetually undo ourselves, forgetting and remembering, the unprotected procreation, whether for abortion or birth, not knowing what else to write, to be, to do, to think, to know, I feel then the need to resist myself, suspending myself in this realm unknown, surrending to the test of time and place, myself, fighting myself, the strive of the condemned individual in the babelesque world of universal peace and universal conflicts. If there is a stage where salvation is truly preached to you, it is within your life, your uneasy misses and truimphs of walking, sleeping and waking to the dawn of your end.