8 ½
I would say Yes to 8 ½ and take hostage of it as significant, making it submit to my verbal summon.
Why another text to express thoughts about 8 ½?
There is always a guilt, my guilt for being unfair to 8 ½.
Will there be any other way to relate to 8 ½ besides calling it a number?
And yet it is always the next number (before the previous) that comes to mind before I can conceive 8 ½.
Each number is at the confluence of innumerable mathematical permutations of calculation – how do I get 8 ½?
Is my writing of 8 ½ fundamental to my personal intention? Accused beyond any fault, 8 ½ has no chance to offer a self-defense in language, because it has its own form and purpose beyond what I intended.
8 ½ is a number and is not.
½ of 1 that comes after 8?
Where did the 8 come from? Will it ever be 9?
I am left to prove that 8 ½ does exist, beyond any doubt.
Must 8 ½ reveal itself as itself, eventually and inevitably?
I cannot break a 9th stick to prove its existence.
I feel responsible to it, and I shall save it from dying.
Each line I write of it, it shall prolong its death; or so I thought.
My fingers struggle to keep it alive. I can't quite bend one of my fingers to form your ½.
Do you exist to die immediately, doom to a certain time and space to die with a flourish?
Is there a heaven for you up there where those below shall look like dots to you?
There is a particular aesthetical value in you, 8 ½. It is as if / is not a boundary but the signifier of a possibility or an impossibility – the before or the after.
Is it closer to 8 or to 9?
But let us not go so far to say that it projects itself. 8 ½ is always 8 ½. That is all it can be.
8 ½
"A smelly bitch that has brought forth plenty of young, already rotting in places, but that to me in my childhood meant everything, who continue to follow me faithfully everywhere, whom I am quite incapable of disciplining, but before whom I shrink back, step by step, shying away from her breath, and who will end up – unless I decide otherwise- forcing me into a corner that I can already see, there to decompose fully and utterly on me and with me, until finally – is it a distinction? – the pus- and worm-ravaged flesh of her tongue laps at my hand."
Franz Kafka
At some point, I feel that there is no turning back once I had summoned her and given her that name. She was always going to die but she could not stop lashing her saliva at me just before her demise. Her speech alone was enough to chain me to this visual prison and all I could do is to isolate this memory into the existent called 8 ½. If that image haunts me, it is really because I allow it to. Her voice with the flying saliva. Though a part of this haunting is still involuntarily, the least I am doing is to claim ownership and authority of it. I name her 8 ½; a specific moment in time; of my life.
In remembrance of things past, I can only resort to a spatially decisive methodology to arrange my scattered memories, though linearly experienced, into pockets of space and in between holes or lacunae.
As the worms burrowed out from their cans, they forced me to a corner that was always there. There she would be, always there, always at the corner. She remains a number I cannot count to under normal circumstances. She always seemed to shun me even though I have named her. I am desperately counting to the next number but I always skipped her. 7…8…9.
But more accurately, I can no longer smell or hear her. What remains is really an ocular experience, embodied into 8 ½.
Will you be so kind as to tell me which corner to turn to now?
I miss 8 ½.
Before I take my life, I shall know that it is my fault that all my life I am trying to fit into a number that I am not. In fact, the mere thought of fitting a number to my identity is absurd and meaningfully meaningless.
I feel more attached to ½. The neither nor.
At least I can no longer complain that there is a side that I can never be. Then again, I suffer an impasse of sorts when I realise I am neither. Where am I?
I can expect, at this point, that by the 8th page, I should end this narrative.
In a sense, I have to accept that what I am writing (have written) have nothing to do with 8 ½.
8 ½ is really not about 8 ½.
As time passes, I begin to understand this and image 8 1/2 in the enclaves of my mind and these black words on a page.
It should and must meet its natural end. But allow us to defer her death till later.
I would say No and release those shackles on her and let her be. There is no lack of sleep now, when the wind will somehow blow her ashes away. And I simply ask myself these questions at that moment of release:
- Where is she flying to?
- Will God take her soul?
- Is she still, somehow, residing in her ashes?
- Who is she without her frail and old body?
- What did she look like when she was alive and young?
- Who was she?
- Who determines which Paradise she might go or is it an eviction from this Paradise?
- Am I still related to her?
There is no 9th question.
From the 9th year on, I stop asking these questions. It becomes less painful to ask. I refused Yes and I am entirely comfortable to remain a No.
Somewhere in between, though, I still imagine myself occupying that space, as if it is the only way I can go about remembering her.
In between those spaces reside the intangible meditations I had of her and as the number of years went past, every imaginations becomes a deferred idea of her. I can't meet her like I used to. But I still meet her. In between.
1982,
If there is a comma, is it that comma before that long hypen that pre-empts my end?
Lately, I find it impossible to write an obituary; for her and for me.
If possible, may someone write a combined piece for the both of us?
We grow weary as the years pass but we can never get used to saying goodbyes. It is like having an illegitimate child and not knowing how to acknowledge it, yet alone take care of.
Witnessing my own death has become a ritual; a ritual to make the pain less painful. And writing has become a masturbation that replaces the orgasm and it is never the actual thing. What is the actual thing? I fall short from the actual experience of intercourse. I fear that whoever I will sleep with is never the bone that came out from me. But I swear I am not a male patriarch.
Instead, every page of the story is like a pre-cursor of a pure event that will never occur. I despise the moment when I must replace a pure event with something else. Perhaps, I have been too mechanical and have devised a linear equation to understand and define the event. From start to end, there is just this long trail and ties of texts that is the result of a tedious act of stringing and quaking the type into an eventual end, repeated and simulated.
Not many would be able to do this publicly. But some can.
At least not in its raw sense. Somehow we make it into a beauteous act and imagine ourselves a world that never quite live up to its promises. Dystopia or Utopia, there is no world except ours. We make do with it. We live it. Before a realm of Paradise or Hades, imagine first a world where many of us are just masturbating, publicly and privately. But it is not about the act, but the aftermath. Pure presence defers from the actual intercourse to a representative act that takes over. It will always bring about the manifestation of an original (sexual) intention but not the actual creative copulation. It is always that glorious bridging of the impossible into the realm of creative possibility. Simply through a pure, repetitive and egoistical act –self-gratifying and self-glorifying.
How could we have the ideal sexual intercourse? We no longer know our partners.
Perhaps, that is also the nature of writing – it's an inevitable act that leaves us weary and breathless. It is an act which we no longer know our Reader. And vice versa.
After every simulated orgy, I don't quite know where to go (imagining a mama-san encouraging me to come back every day).
I could leave my position and find my rest.
But I have no desire for hypostasis or dialectics, and I have not read Mani's texts.
All I have is 'I', every bit and breadth of it.
Perhaps there is always confluence where I find myself trapped in. But distortion always creeps into it and I am manifested in eights and nines.
There is never that true sense of the in between. We always fail in writing.
I will never acknowledge that there is a simple way to relate this tension. There is no way but the narrow way. And yet what I have in front (and back) is entire world at its anxious; as if it is always ready to devour me. I can't be myself. I am left with the medium of writing.
Perhaps, then, it is not about being myself. Is it then a mysterious respect for the other (side of the 8)?
Perhaps.
One way or the other, isn't that what screws us all up?
I don't suffer from a perpetual mononucleosis but I can't help but feel the need to make a clear distinction between one and the other, before I have that intimate caress and kiss of death. (is that why I write/masturbate?) But can I actually "have" these physical acts? With whom?
But eventually, I find myself, instead, in an I-and-the-rest-of-the-world situation. I-and-Others.
But let us not go into depth into an ontological study of this supposed phenomenon.
It is often true that we are much lonelier than we imagined.
Surely now, this is no longer a writing about one or two.
I can only imagine that there is someone, anyone, who is reading this text. There is first 'I' in all its variants that read this text. But who is the next to read? Who am I when I read?
What comes after writing?
I would say [fill in the blanks] and find no one waiting for me except the thousand faces that haunt me since the day I was born. Every cry, tear and the sound of the outside rain will be there to greet me.
How excruciating! I cannot understand why my first greeting must be a loud wail and at last a silent oblivion that marks my last slumber.
I cannot be there at the end to write about myself. My death comes after the orgy; after the masturbation and simulated orgy. My end comes at the moment life is take away and no cleaning can really remove the stains.
Perhaps.
I am preparing for that final ritual of death, which death is the amalgamation of all imagined ends.
But this ritual, once internalized, is merely indifference. I am going to die anyway. I am indifferent to this fact. Or am I?
Wait.
½ is that indifference!
It is an indifference to the final referent.
It is an uttered silence of the in between where all majorities can be bundled up into a final referent.
HALF.
That is precisely the power it wields – the speculative power of being polemic or having multiple perspectives. There are always alternative answers, by way of clarifications and not truths. "It is a place of absorption and implosion."
It is to create that reservoir where all rivers will flow to and one is safe in the knowledge that nature will function according to one's intention, and not overflow.
Perhaps.
The thrust of life is that indifferent power and energy that we as creative being are finally left with. I am left with a mirror that reflects my face and absorbs everything that I project onto it. Hence, I am left with the choice of masking my face within the limitations of my physicality.
A disappeared Father best exemplifies that sense of post-1/2.
But it is that void, that mystery of absence that compels the ½ to exist. We cannot leave anything unattended. Everything needs a proper name.
A Father is that proper name; the Father who masturbated and imagined that a virgin child came out of that activity.
That is what that haunts me – an evil that we cannot give a proper name to.
Some things never existed until a name is given. In this case, this existed before any name was given to it.
HALF.
That is what I shall call it.
It is the curse of the infinite sign ∞ that signifies nothing except towards itself till it reaches a state of implosion. Meaning loses its source and floats around as potentials. However,
8 has to remain upright, forever a symbol to our hopes and faith. Hence, it ceases to be the infinite sign. It is a number, a definite signified of some identical entity. A potential becomes a definitive, no matter how illusionary that is. Perhaps, my doctrine of speculative-power is now a myth. And I seriously do not know if religious myths are truths.
God has that (human) signification of being that silent indifference. As if to predict his disappearance, two silent signifiers accompany a presence. Perhaps that silence is actually what pronounces his presence. God in this sense, remains in the realm of the imagination and dreams. After all, we never quite 'listen' to sounds in our dreams.
Only in writing do the silent signifiers appear. But I am not keen to impose a reading to what is already loaded with meanings and significations. Writing in the aftermath of Writing, unfortunately cannot be the same as it was once conceived as.
Am I embarking on a fruitless journey to discover something that I do not even know what it is?
Perhaps, I am expressing a paradox that has no answer.
On one hand, we behave with a powerful indifference, which is speculative in its general use. (To us, it may not even be speculations!)
On the other, God has that indifferent attitude towards our speculative-power to signify.
"Say what you want about me. I am who I am."
Who is perhaps, Half.
We are always, almost correct. We can't help it. That is the destiny we have created for ourselves when dialectics befell us.
All I can now do is to suspend my teleological impulses. I cannot avoid my ethical impulses though. There will always be an Abel I will to slain. There will always be a Hagar who will give an eldest son I would later cast away. My sin will be impatience. My sin will be idolatry at its most banal and yet imaginative sense. My sin will be my masturbatory words that attempt to erase the most holy of words.
One cannot imagine away these impulses. Half way there, half-imagined, in between two definitive signifiers. One a presence, the other an absence. And yet we try. We categorise them, de facto.
My body is 8. My spirit is 9.
In between I live and die as ½.
½ is sex.
Half is a child.
½ is alive.
Half is dead.
Don't ask me what that final referent is. We all make a lot of noise when in fact, that is a silent indifference. Seriously, do we really expect heaven to fall down on us in perfect harmony and perfect embrace? What do I have left? Where is 8 ½?
Where the final word or number is never quite finished.
"Ricordati che è un film comico."
(Remember, this is a comedy.)
2008
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