Softest shout

At the club
the loud music… noise and chatter
We belong to the noisiest places
'He listens to her every shout with the attention he would give to the softest whisper'

What is a crowd?
No PDA?
We would be behind the layered curtain of people when our lips are supposed to meet

- part of our body would spiral like the steps that led us here to sin,

perhaps.

Bureaucrat

What a bureaucrat of Love

'we will write to each other like sms and email do not exist.'

He fed us all the unwillingness of female virgins

Castrate him

I am compiling a list of guy friends who would make a good eunuch

2 centuries before

Wrong Tool

It's wrong
it's the wrong tool.
To reach for the magnifying glass to look for
something that resembles truth.

Circus Magic

The roadshow music they are blasting made you felt like a clown walking down the street, with balloons and at times, both feet above ground.

While you are listing out what to perform, you are also thinking how circus magic won’t bring her back, how circus magic won’t remove the impact - the impact of his actions.

The noises from trumpets and tin drums are nothing compared to a rustling plastic bag in the middle of the night.

Circus magic won’t absolve his sins. Circus magic won’t bring her back.

He looked again at his only audiences, the children. On the street, how they behaved like the insane. They have shrill sound for laughter, she is pulling up her skirt and he is pulling down his trouser for no reason. They can’t stand still, they need to jump and run, cry and shout, ask questions, suck and lick fingers.
Now he can’t remember how they are related, related to what he wanted to say when he has a nose so huge and red.

Woundows

Meaning too precise is sure
To void your dreamy literature.

- Mallarmé (Translated by A. S. Kline)

I could have had this rewritten with a pen
Four years ago but then

Made a note of these words:

Wind, the breeze
Wind, the crank I am winding
Wound, what have I turned, and a cut
Window, a cut on the wall

Woundow

To remember I owe you an explanation
of the window on the flesh of her wall
The view is coloured how
Wrong impressions were painted

Excerpt from 'Hegel, Zizek & Substance as Subject by Davie Maclean

Australia prides itself on the tolerance we practice towards difference within our multicultural society. Any cultural position is allowed, it is purely a personal matter, and no one should have to suffer for their ethnic, religious, sexual or cultural identity. But does this tolerance not have a blind spot ? Is there not one cultural position that simply will not be tolerated within our tolerant society?

What about the person whose cultural identity involves telling racist jokes? Or sexist jokes for that matter, or homophobic, or... or... We will tolerate anything — except intolerance. That we will not tolerate.

So to what extent are we really a tolerant society?

For the Left, of course, the question is not about the right to tell racist jokes. The real issue, however, becomes clearer once we begin to explore further what is excluded from our ‘tolerant’ society, from our democratic political process.

Let us begin with the obvious — Islamic fundamentalism, clearly not acceptable, One Nation populism, likewise. But just why are these political options beyond the pale? Is it because they seek to impose a social project on society as a whole? That they stand for a social order that would apply to all?

And as such are they not condemned as fascist? Fascist they may well be — but the problem for the Left does not lie with them, it lies with us. What about our social project, what about socialism, or communism, or more loosely a commitment to social justice, to the environment? Are these not caught in the same net? Are they not fascist too?

In other words, is any social project whatsoever not excluded in this way? Is it not defined in advance as fascist, or totalitarian, and unacceptable as such?

It is here we find the hole in the centre of Western democracy — anyone can hold any political position they like so long as the existing social order is left untouched.

Where does this leave the Left? Clearly it can not accept these limitations for its goal is precisely to transform the social order. Somehow a breach must be found, some way of changing what is politically possible and what is not. For Zizek the resistance of the excluded to their exclusion offers one such possibility. We can see how this works in the approach Zizek would adopt towards the refugee crisis. For Zizek, it is the soft liberal humanitarian approach to the boat people that the Left must reject above all, the position that argues as a tolerant, humane society we can not turn our backs on these poor people. To Zizek this is pure ideology.

Instead it is the right wing response to the refugee problem that should be the point of entry for the Left. For when the Right argue that the boat people represent the tip of the iceberg, that accepting them will open the floodgates and lead ultimately to the complete destruction of our way of life, Zizek’s response would be, ‘Yes, that’s exactly why we should accept them’.

Necessity and Contingency

This reversal is homologous to the one that characterizes the Hegelian dialectics of necessity and contingency. In a first approach, it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, i.e., that necessity itself posits and mediates contingency as the external field in which it expresses – actualizes itself – contingency itself is necessary, the result of the self-externalization and self-mediation of the notional necessity. However, it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contingency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very elevation of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act, one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent (“open”) struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to S, from Substance to Subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation (“spontaneous self-organization”), contingency engenders – posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively “posits its own presupposition,” i.e., it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance); this positing, however, is retroactive.

Slavoj Žižek

The Autistic Society: Individual Disorder and Collective Order

During lunch at Fortune Centre, I told a friend about your idea of this country as an ‘autistic’ society. This topic was raised after a security guard from the building came by and quibbled with the tenants, of mostly food businesses, occupying the ground floor. It was over how many inches beyond the yellow line, the tables and chairs are placed outside, along the sidewalk (you know, our version of al fresco). As if the day-to-day woes of having a low-budget lunch in town (the crowd, the uptight hunt for a table…) are not enough, this ‘lunchtime entertainment’ made it all the more pathetic – pathetic to even those who have to witness it, human beings fighting over problems marked by dirty yellow tapes on the floor

It does not really matter if the friend fully appreciated or understood it, but it was a good exercise for me to revisit our earlier conversation on autism. (I elaborated my point of view to him while we went through the usual process of what every supposed thinking person would do: seeing things from another angle [how else?] and picturing this problem in contrast to other scenarios [what else?]).

So, what were the similarities between autistic and bureaucratic behaviours that made you deployed the word ‘autistic’, as a metaphor to describe our society?

Could the reason be, like the bureaucrats, the autistics seem to possess certain rationale behind each of their act; that there is a sense of regularity or order – even though autism is classified as a form of psychological disorder? With the exception of God and James Dean, of course, is not every act, everything in existence, rooted in a cause, if not a reason? (This area is rather complex for me, such as the distinction between reason and cause, rational and irrational causes etc. – my logic is really weak.)

Or was it because despite having different motivations, causes, intentions or rationales, these two categories somehow produced the same effect of rigid and inflexible behaviours?

A fire safety officer would be able to justify, with sufficient practical reasons, the necessity of clear corridors in residential area because of the fire safety guidelines. The objects misplaced are fire safety hazards, disrupting emergency evacuation… An autistic person, have enough reasons to convince themselves to move from one point to another in a peculiar way. This perturbs us as much as the bureaucratic inconveniences we are tolerating on a daily basis. And we are just as much of a nuisance and the source of discomfort when we contradict the principles of these two groups. Forcing an autistic child to talk or walk the ‘normal’ way is fundamentally similar to not filling up a registration form properly.

Then what is the difference between the two? An obvious aspect would be their quantitative difference. Does it mean we can say the difference is solely a matter of degree and not type? In these two extreme cases of inflexibility we see the tension between the one and the multiple, of an individual against the collective, of Universal vs. Particular (Hegel)… sure they are numbers one/few against many etc. but the quantitative difference, here, has brought about qualitative changes. Therefore, this is rather a difference of type in the guise of degree, where we witness how subjective order (of the autistics) is classified as a disorder. And how the general will to have an ordered world is very much the source of many minor disorders in our lives – the situation where the railings along the road, for road safety, perhaps, obstructing the way of a wheelchair-bound person.

Two petty men had Fish ‘N’ chips for dinner

A revolution, because of the portion we were served
We talked about leaving the country
Our pettiness shamed us, over the portion of fish n’ chips we want to leave, over food we want to revolt
And Fish ‘N’ Chips is not even a local dish
Crazy and childish
But I remember Oliver Twist’s adventure only truly began when he asked for an extra serving

Talking: letting out gas

During an interview, Federico Fellini said that he does not to like talk about films in the process of making, or before it’s completed. It is a kind of superstition he prefers to keep. Whatever esoteric rationales he had for such a belief, I begin to relate it to the many times when ideas I had were not realised after they were said or discussed with too many people. This is especially true when the idea was mentioned to those not directly related it. By talking about it, the desire to produce the work somehow evaporates. We all know evaporation does not mean disappearance. In science, evaporation describes a change in the physical state of matter: dissolution not disappearance. But we seldom mind using it as a metaphorical substitution for the word ‘disappearance’, of what cease to exist.

Therefore, this is not necessarily because talking is an antithetical act to concrete production, rather it is an act of production in its most minimalist form: gas. It is a difference of degree, not type. The idea turned into a form of representation through our speech, by our talks and gestures, during conversations, is a form even more intangible and ephemeral than the idea itself. Letting others hear about your idea too soon, before anything is done at all, you will receive suggestions or comments that mutilate the idea like a premature review or a critique that would trigger a foetal death of the idea. This often is the case despite their good intentions, regardless if it was a good or bad review.

By associating talking to gas emitting, a fairly visceral analogy comes to mind – an inverted reflection, to be precise.

A person suffering from constipation, most of the time, seems no different to a person with a clear bowel, like the similarity between a failed writer and a loafer, they both share the similar effects of nothingness – which is to say that both of them didn’t shit. However, this similarity is only apparent. The former farts more often – be it loud or silent. Talking about an idea is very much like this physical symptom common to one suffering from constipation. You have an idea, you can’t concretise it yet, you talked about it instead. You have the urge to shit, but you couldn’t, you fart instead, the toilet bowl was as clean as before you sat on it, but you flushed it anyway.

For those, who disapprove this slightly scatological example, we can also think of it as opening a can of beer or Coke, letting the gas out and only to drink it three hours later. This instance was drawn by the plights of many fine art students and artists who have to keep talking about their proposal to too many people,. And when it is the time to do the work, they would feel like they are drinking stale beer and Coke without fizzle, but with taste diluted by the melted ice cubes.

Of course, apart from the above, there are many other reasons why we talk. We talk to impress, to brag about ourselves, the things we have, the things we know - our bank deposit, and mental capacity, respectively; we talk because it built us the bridge of intimate relationships; we talk because we are anxious or worried about something; we talk to others our problems to share it, thus to pass the burden, the problem, to another; and we talk about an idea for a painting or writing because we have been thinking about it; we talk because we couldn’t keep a secret, because gossiping is a past time.. But if only we could hold it, hold our breath for a moment. And let it sublimate or mediate to a more concrete form.

Weren’t we instructed to keep away from the concrete when it is still wet? I now read it as an instruction to keep one’s prolificacy. A reminder of the emptiness of almost every speech act. Talk is really cheap.

Excerpt from a letter to Isabel, written in August

Nostalgia, nostalgia, what a disease we are glad there aren't any vaccinations against. […]

I like how you questioned it, 'Where has all that time gone?!'
It reminded me of an idea inspired by a close friend's passing remark, few years back, about some 'little guys' committing time-theft or something. Some little fuckers stealing our time unknowingly, tuning clocks around us faster and faster. When I was younger things were really slower. My mom and uncle also said so. People like to say how time flies, I absolutely disagree. It didn't fly away. To me, it went missing. It must be stolen, I don't think I misplaced any of my time – stolen, when I wasted my time staring blankly, staring at the clock, at the second hand’s impatient rotation in contrast to the apparently inert hour hand.

Stolen, but time itself often behaves like a thief or burglar at night, slithered thru' the thin, tall gaps between the closed door and its frame. (the two of them – the door and its frame, no, the door and the door frame, I mean – they would never get close enough to close the gap between them, to touch each other).

Stealing our youth, using atom-sized knives to add wrinkles on our faces, a simplified replica of the blueprint for another subway system, but we blame it on the number of times we smile and frown...

pulling our skin, and we wrongly blamed it on gravity...

plucking our hair, a better explanation for our hair loss than our diet or our genes?...

drilling our memories, to add screws and hang only the few significant scenes framed with faint borders overlapping each other, destroying the rest of the impressions we could have remembered... (isn't photographing or painting a replicate of this last laborious act of selective memory?) the images are vague but they aren’t vignettes, the wooden picture frames interlocked like rings of an old rusty chain, twenty-nine years long, pulled out of a poorly imagined chest where memories are haphazardly stacked and badly wrapped, see how the wrappers are creased.

Our melancholia, with unknown causes, these guys seep through our skin pores to hang tiny weights and dumbbells on our heart. Dancers, they always manage to shake off these body builder’s paraphernalia. Dancers, definitely, are happier beings than those who chose to sit down, to write or draw – to write or draw… nothing but another tall building with another high ceiling where another pendulum is hung… swinging, swinging, I am not sure if the oscillation would eventually cease… gravity and melancholy.

Nostalgia and Melancholia, they aren’t just the different states that one could be in, but also countries, nations, kingdoms, territories and lands some are dwelling in. Just because they were named to rhyme with the word ‘Russia’; just because the word ‘state’ reminds me of its synonyms (just in case you need to know how the relations were drawn). I am not making sense here, I know.

Sorry for digressing, let’s return to time-theft. Therefore, according to such an untenable logic, fuelled by an imagination some would love to diss, Isabel XXXXX should be 21 and I could be 19, and Junie, er... 6, I guess.

To Surfian’s remarkable taste

I crave, I long for Abstinence from Images, for every image is bad. – Roland Barthes

If I have the ability, in the near future, I would write for you and those who left an art exhibition opening with distaste. Writing in praise of your reaction, the bad aftertaste lingering in, not just your mouth but around your respiratory system, the noise from their laughter, the sight of them posing, and flashes from the cameras. You overheard their conversation. You told me you are sure now, ‘Maybe, I try to be an average art student, but never a fucking artist!’ I smiled and repeated how I prefer to know someone from what they hate than what they like. Their embraces and handshakes put you off. Therefore let us get drunk on their free wine and puke into their mouths when they are about to utter more shit about ideas, issues, beauties, feelings, or B-grade philosophy. But you told me your wish to remain as a Muslim who does not drink. I might be able to understand why ‘the artist standing next his/her work for a photograph puts you off as much those photographed in front of landmarks or next to a posh car parked outside a hotel.’

We have mentioned, ‘Publication is Prostitution.’ But we did not say how an exhibition could be as well. Walking pass any red light districts, it would often be disturbing, disturbed by either the field of temptation or field of repulsion. Girls sell their flesh, and they admit it – except to the anti-vice squad, perhaps. Exhibitions to trade or circulate images, but of course, of supposed cultured and artistic geniuses… It is the difference of admitting and denying, being aware and unaware. If I am confident enough, my thoughts coherent enough, my grasps of grammar and vocabulary strong enough, I would write about how ridiculous they socialised, forming little circles, how you told me the artworks, reduced to decorations for these social events, piss you off, how the assortment of accents had raped your ears. Then you forgot you are telling this to an aspiring ‘pimp’. It is nothing at all. You are too serious. They are merely things if not commodities. Save your reverence for other moments and objects. So what if they have reduced it to decorations? No big deal.

Mr Crouch - Philip Larkin

Get into the habit of forgetting everything except the page in front of you. Sit for a moment, concentrating, and pretend you're wiping an ice-cold sponge across your mind, leaving everything quite clear and free. Forget yesterday, forget tomorrow, forget who you are and what you are going to do next. Then start.'

Grace and Miss Patridge - George Friel

'He came at last to a dark deserted side street still north of the river lit by old fashioned gas lamps where the brackets holding the mantles were shaped question marks asking him where he was going. He had no idea.'

...

Here in our Earth hotel
the cream of society lodged
with an elegant carefree gesture
they bore the burden of life
Walter Mehring

Time shades

Let time shade our shelves with dust.

Scenes indebted to clichés (and perhaps Alain Robbe-Grillet)

It was a typical scene. She ordered a conventional drink. To avoid the reflective curves of her eyes, he stared at the condensation marks each time the glass was lifted. The full view of 2 overlapping circles is the view of 2 incomplete orbits: rubber bands on the table, 100 Plus, Olympic Games, 2 rings left on top of the low bookshelf, for 2 years. What he murmured was sweeter than the few drips of diluted juice spilled. What was said would be sweeter than the orange blotches on the white of her dress.

It was a conventional scene. He ordered a typical drink. He no longer noticed her glossy eyes. The condensation mark that appeared, when the glass was shifted, caught his attention instead. The circular print eclipsed by the circular glass stamp, the full view of 2 incomplete circles is the picture of two overlapping orbits: her hair bands on his table, silver and gold rings on the white bookshelf close to the window. What he uttered was way bitterer than the coffee that seeped his tongue. What he answered was much colder than the cold and sour coffee which was served close to an hour ago.

It was a hot day, yet he insisted on a hot drink. Her eyes were a red pair of soft, moist rims. The tears that trickled down… the heat… the arguments… her hand, she wipes her face… spreading the tears… her cheeks… her soft wet skin. The memory of eyes brimming with tears is merely a synopsis of two intersecting loops. Her hair on his face, the bed, his pillow, on the floor… well, everywhere in his bedroom. The warping bookshelf, he used silver and gold markers to draw the ‘landing pad’ for the rings. What he has written, nothing but a postmortem of these words for two. What else were etched and stressed than the two insignificant blotches, a sheer white dress, and many circles that came in pairs?
* * * * *
It was at the crime scene. He needed more time to think. One of her eyes was really swollen. It is only dried-blood trails that he feels numb to, not the fresh red pool

You mentioned your disinterest

You mentioned your disinterest in current politics, and I took a detour to explain why I agree. I began with photography: the people who took pictures excessively are very much the inversed reflection of gunmen in those trigger-happy countries. Shooting, shooting, flash is gunfire, how the images of all Alpha-males, smooth-skin females, theirs poses and expressions, on posters and billboards; the scenic views of fireworks, landmarks and beautiful hills from dramatic angle and light are all distasteful at the moment – their fetish for immediacies.

I want to assault every tourist and journalist, and step on their cameras.

With relation to that owl of Minerva, of old Hegel, your smiles and nods, the wings in the evenings, I didn’t understand until I spoke about it. I said nothing about why the sound, if not the look, of an owl frightens X., because it has got nothing to do with you.

I said nothing about a book by Mary Midgley, which was another postponed desire to browse. Preservation is essentially destruction. I hated my use of such expressions.

Borges contra Neruda, a the reminder of the contradistinction between detachment and the world… you and me, we went on and on, but what are than merely non-profiting merchants trading more names and ideas, in short.

This morning, the person next to me was chatting via the mobile. It is not because the stranger is of another race, or of different God and aspiration. A stranger chattering, loud, is loud enough to make me hear the difference between two ways of breaking silence. Talking and writing. Now I am sure, every conversation is profane. This includes what’s mentioned above, perhaps.

I referred to X. as a friend who once refuted me. ‘No matter how well your diatribes against photography are equipped with ethical or aesthetical insights, you can’t deny how you enjoyed looking at old photos.” And that was precisely my point. I appreciate only photographs fermented by time, of politics mediated into history, of all the mundane or exciting conversation turning into vintage trinkets for nostalgia.

I made a decision to swing between silence and incoherent clichés, the set-meal options of either muteness or madness, for oral use only.

Still Life

on the surface,
of earth, perhaps
the wish to be removed as an appendix

at her whim

a box, of the new fridge
big enough,
no we were small enough
climbin, close the flaps from inside
a cave? a cell?
whatever two could imagine
for about less than a minute
suffocating

this is the conversation we were now trapped in,
last evening

his thoughts, like that technician's old trolley,
we have to steer it back to the right direction

it is an imperative to stab him

In this erratic plight known as life
I cut out the miserable length of my time on earth,

Shut up and listen!
If I have time, I would explain why the length is miserable later.

Shit! With this knife and my clumsy fingers,
the jagged outline suggests another use, the proper use of this burnt sienna blade
some idiots I have to stab, many idiots who deserved to be crippled,
and one idiot who won’t be around soon

it eases me a bit, the mere thought of this
So where is he?
Where the fuck is he? Son of a powdered, wrinkled whore!

two short, broken pieces

the picture
a piece of inaction
you must learn to see
reverse
not just the other side
reverse the time, chronological order
study, the negative of a photo
when it was developed
before the picture was printed
all the negatives of my actions


the rhizomatous nature
of an idea
the pain
from the fall
Idea hits
headlong
not something flying towards you
but you plunged onto
the concrete floor
the cracks
like roots
in the many worlds of many silly cartoons

to explain the anxiety,
scattering my attention,
when another idea is fighting for existence

Fuck, the clouds again

Renaissance clouds,
high as another ancient arch,

a puff of Magritte Cloud,
so low, very close
right above, my love said ,
like in a painting.
she was there,
somewhere the painting, the sky, their mutual possession
I mean, the sky like the painting, or painted like the sky…?

was thinking,
how we adore the view of the clouds

and before I describe, in unbearably dramatic tones, the clarity of the blue
envelope without folds that the floating puffs have been eclipsing…

but the view of everything right beneath,
when we are shadowed by one, below one hovering low,
spells impending, Medieval doom
of lightning and strong spiral wind
of rain and thunder

I know what to falsely accuse, like how I know who to blame,
it is the fault of stories and cartoons I was fed as a child

No.
it is still the traffic here, the people around, and the type of conversation they held

Rusty Rotations

I
He mentioned about the state of those broken fans.
But without elaborating further, why they are called ‘fan with a twisted head’:
the twisted head of a celebrity found in a fatal car crash.

Peeling, cracking paint, it must be the rusty cage,
and dusty blades; the droning sound it has been making since last Tuesday; not responding to the flow of the current, after alternating one finger between the buttons on the fan and the socket, a few times.

II
He mentioned about the abandoned bicycle chained to the green railing and the street lamp post, or left at the bicycle lot…
Prey to three half-hearted thefts

the seat, one pedal, handle grips
the brake cables but not levers
the front wheel but not the back wheel, it must be the complexity of gears and chain; the missing handle

Now, this metal frame with a deflated wheel is a bad imitation of the unicycle
but
The sight transported him far away to safari
The sight is now a free trip he won to Africa.
What an exaggeration! It is only close to a free TV preview of another animal documentary.
He loves the tone of the narrator voice, his articulation…
They tied the buffalo to the tree, lions, hyenas, vultures, and flies took turns

III
It was an event then.
Though, not an event as important as his cousin’s wedding day
Not a decision as burdensome as committing to a house loan
But not as insignificant as making a choice of which set meal to have, while standing at the fast food counter; of which beer to buy, while cool air from the chiller rush onto him

To buy a bicycle, is an event:
Some persuasions, Dad…
Some promises kept, since you did well, son…
A present.
But don’t cycle too far… not on the roads… only weekends...

‘It was another afternoon after school. Tommy was on the bicycle chained to one of the pipes ‘decorating’ the wall outside the flat. He was pedalling furiously, although he could only pedal anticlockwise. The few times he tried moving forward, there were always the stolid pulls. At such moments, he was the surrogate soul of this wilful bicycle leashed to the metal pipe. He had yet to learn about the difference between the conduit that sends the shit away and the one that brings water in, but he was already well-acquainted with the pipe’s uncompromising character, like the pillars, walls and locked doors. This was he closet he ever felt to the tug a pet dog suffers when taken out for a walk. This was also an initiation to a category of worldly experiences: the-impossibility-of-forward-movement-consoled-by-stationary-rotations.

“What an effective fight against time and linearity, Tommy. I did that as well when I was young.”

He was not listening to Young Relative. Instead, Tommy was reminded when he last did that, his playmate, Cindy nagged, in the tone of an under-aged Auntie, “ Hey, my daddy says the chain will be loose if you do this!’ He was transgressing against what she admonished like a dictum.

When he is older, he would say, “Why is there always something for others to say whenever he is having fun on his bicycle?”

He would write, how when he was tired of this stagnant anti-clockwise exercise, he would tilt up the rear of the bike. With the wheel, few degrees from the ground, he wound the disc crank with his hand. It is quite hypnotic to gaze at the 36 spokes glitter, when spun. But more often he was reminded of the view of the Ferris wheel from the highway, but a Ferris wheel gone crazy, turning like wheels of the cars travelling alongside. Piercing the inside of the rim and converging at the hub, he would recall the temptation to hurt himself by placing his finger between the symmetrically arranged spokes. '

IV
The bicycle was an integral part of that year’s resolution, to exercise more often; a part of the crazy idea to cycle to work…

…the space it occupied inside or right outside the house

Mcluhan was concerned with how it is an extension of our legs;
W. read it as an epitome of relation, of many failed or abandoned relationships, the rusty, dusty skeleton of memories and afternoons which had made him sick.

Hopscotch Chapter 132 - Julio Cortazar

And while somebody explains something as always, I don't know why I am in this cafe, in all cafes, in the Elephant & Castle, in the Dupont Barbes, in the Sacher, in the Pedrocchi, in the Gijon, in the Greco, in the Cafe de la Paiz, in the Cafe Mozart, in the Florian, in the Capoulade, in Les Deux Magots, in the bar that puts its chair out on the Colleone Square, in the Cafe Dante fifty yards away from the tomb of the Scaligers and that face on a pink sarcophagus that looks as if it had been burned by the tears of Saint Mary of Egypt, in the cafe across from the Giudecca, with aged and impoverished marchionesses drinking a tiny tea and getting expensive with dusty ambassadors, in the Jandilla, in the Floccos, in the Cluny, in the Richmond in Suipacha, in El Olmo, in the Closerie des Lilas, in the Stephane (which is on Rue Mallarme) , in the Tokio (which is in Chivilcoy), in the Au Chien Qui Fume, in the Opern Cafe, in the Dome, in the Cafe du Vieux Port, in cafes anywhere

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets

Hart Crane dixit. But they're more than that, they are the neutral territory for the stateless soul, the motionless center of the wheel from where one can reach himself in full career, see himself enter and leave like maniac, wrapped up in women or IOU's or epistemological theses, and while the coffee swirls around the little cup that goes from mouth to mouth along the edge of days, can loosely attempt revision and balance, equally removed from the ego that came into the cafe an hour ago and from the ego that will leave within another hour. Self-witness and self-judge, an ironical autobiography between two cigarettes.

In cafes I remember dreams, one no man's land revives another; now I rememeber one, but no, I only remember that I must have dreamed something marvelous and that in the end I felt as if expelled (or leaving, but forcibly) from the dream that remained irremediably behind me. I don't even know if I closed a door behind me, I think I did; in fact a separation was established between what had already been dreamed (perfect, spherrical, fnished) and the present. But I kept on sleeping, that business of expulsion and the door closing I also dreamed. A single terrible certainty dominated that instant of transition within the dream; to know that irremediably that expulsion brought with it the complete fogetting of the previous marvel. I suppose that the feeling of a door closing was just that, fateful and instantaneous forgetting. The most startling is remembering also having dreamed that I was forgetting the previous dream, and that that dream had to be forgotten (my expulsion from its finished sphere).

All this must have, I imagine, an Edenic root. Perhaps Eden, as some would like to see it, is the mythopoetic projection of good old fetal times that persist in the unconscious. I suddenly understand better the frightening gesture of Masaccio's Adam. He covers his face to protect his vision, what had been his; he preserves in that small manual night the last landscape of his paradise. And he cries (because the gesture is also one that accompanies weeping) when he realizes that it is useless, that the real punishment is the one about to begin: the forgetting of Eden, that is to say, bovine conformity, the cheap and dirty joy of work and sweat of the brow and paid vacations.

(-61)

On Bikers - Chien Swee-Teng

I have said enough about how the road is dangerous because many idiots are armed with driving licences. Let me proceed to the next bunch of idiots who are more often danger to themselves: bikers. It is amusing how one would feel cool or get an adrenaline rush just because there’s an engine vibrating beneath their crotch. Pathetic animals, with the numbest of souls…

Framemaking

The rain,
a punishment for stepping out of the house early?
- Not to see it that way.

The wooden back of the picture frame, the coarse, brown tapes around

There were so many frames and pictures there - and that Indian man, the frame maker:The price, the colour, the thickness, how many days…

What do we know about framing then?
I still know nothing about framing now
Don’t be jealous, she knows nothing about framing as well

Please don’t see it that way.
See the rippled mirror on the ground, of our world inverted.
Revolution is redundant. A puddle of water can turn the world upside down with liquidated clarity.

Thanks to the rain, clouds will be gliding on the road.

Pardon my clumsiness,
but I wanted to say our socks and shoes would be wetter than it is now,
wetter whenever we decide to walk on the clouds right after what's poured from the sky.

Our toes will be moistly wrinkled but the sky will tremor beneath us.

Wetter if we were to dash through, now, and stomp the rippled clouds, houses, branches and leaves

Better whenever we step on the reflection of ourselves,we bear the excitement and giggles
which will rhyme with those we had when we used to jaywalk together.

Octavio Paz on Marinetti's 'words on leave' and his own concept of freedom

Interviewer: By the end of the forties you had published two major books, the poems collected in Freedom on Parole (Libertad bajo palabra) and The Labyrinth of Solitude. I've always been curious about the title of Freedom on Parole. Does it have anything to do with the futurist poet Marinentti's "words on leave" (parole in liberta)?

Paz: I am afraid not. Marinetti wanted to free words from the chains of syntax and grammar, a kind of aesthetic nihilism. Freedom on Parole has more to do with morals than aesthetics. I simply wanted to say freedom is conditional. In english, when you are let out of jail you're "on parole," and "parole" means speech, word, word of honour. But the condition under which you are free is language, human awareness.

Interviewer: So for you freedom of speech is more than the right to speak your mind?

Paz: Absolutely. Ever since I was an adolescent I 've been intrigued by the mystery of freedom. Because it is a mystery. Freedom depends on the very thing that limits or denies it, fate, God, biological or social determinism, whatever. To carry out its mission, fate counts on the complicity of our freedom, and to be free, we must overcome fate. The dialectics of freedom and fate is the theme of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, although in Shakespeare fate appears as passion (love, jealousy, ambition, envy) and as chance. In Spanish theater - especially in Calderon and Tirso de Molina - the mystery of freedom expresses itself in the language of Christian theology: divine providence and free will. The idea of conditional freedom implies the notion of personal responsibility. Each of us, literally, either creates or destorys his own freedom. A freedom that is always precarious, And that brings up the title's poetic or aesthetic meaning: poem-freedom-stands above an order-language.

Gaps - Bus-stop, Bus driver, Bus Numbers

It is pointless to describe the unpleasantness of waiting for the bus to come. Is it necessary to hear another person cursing the stupid weather here?

It is pointless to describe how he is proud of himself, when he managed to predict the spot the bus exactly stops; how he could guess the number of the oncoming buses by judging the vehicle model, when the route numbers are too far to be read clearly; how often he mistook similarly shaped numbers, for instance Bus 9 for Bus 2.

At the bus stop, he often recall what she said 30years ago, “I get so impatient…I feel like boarding any bus that comes along. At least I am moving.”

Unlike his ex-girlfriend, his impatience, expressed in such self-deceptive thoughts, was to change the route numbers. He was waiting for Bus 14, but arrving bus, read in red background and white text, was ‘174’ instead, at that moment, he wished he had red paint to paint over the ‘7’ which stood between ‘1’ and ‘4’. When it was Bus 980 he was waiting, but came Bus 960, ‘6’ would appear to him, irrationally, as an incomplete ‘8’. He would have this urge to extend the curve line that emerged from the left of ‘o’ until it touches the right side. And if Bus 106 came instead of Bus 190, he imagined he could switch order of ‘0’ and ‘6’, and invert ‘6’ to ‘9’.

It is also pointless to describe the how these people feel, the expression on their faces when the bus ‘finally arrives’; how they flocked together and towards the door. But sure it was a magical sight. It was as if there was an invisible piece of magnet was fixed behind the entrance door, and these people are really made of metal: they must be androids, the force which gathered the scattered crowd.

It is not pointless to describe the look on some bus-driver’s face, the look of having too much self-importance, a kind of snobbishness in their reticence. It is not pointless to mention how the passengers are like fans running after the celebrity, however, this relationship is superficial. They were not after his autograph but the bus, his arrogance is awkward because it is not the deserved arrogance of the rock star, but the snobbish expressions of the stage crew, who were cheered and applaused, mistakenly, before the start of the concert, as the member of the band coming on stage, due to the poor lighting.

His Young Relative has more sympathy and empathy for the drivers: “I can never be a bus driver. It has nothing to do with qualifications. It is a matter of character. Of one able to withstand the traffic condition, during a jam, where the driver has no rights to make a detour; of irritating green and healthy, local and expat, helmuted cyclists who gets in the driver’s way; the kamikaze Indian and Chinese workers cycling on the road; the many idiots with driving licence; their number one nemesis ‘taxi-drivers; the horrible passengers, the threat of being assault; of driving the same route many times a day, few hundred times a year. But most importantly, a Zen control of the bowel and the bladder. What if, on a day, my stomach wasn’t feeling hundred percent? Although, not as bad as having diarrhoea.”

Gaps - Vacant seats and noise

On the top deck of the double-decker bus, the jerks, inertia, the balancing acts are steps of a ritual dance well-practiced by many, yet to be choreographed.

Each time, up the short and narrow stairwell he has the slight anxiety of a mundane revelation: “if there’s a seat?”

The empty seats are gaps for him to breathe. Not only allowing him a sigh of relief, the randomly vacant seats are arrangements in the scores for various tunes of Minor Joy.

Despite his age, he couldn’t conceal the grateful expression on his face. Grateful to the mercy, of one spared the discomfort of standing; gripping on the handrail. The joy he felt, the luxury of choosing a seat (if it was not crowded). But to whom should he be grateful?

An ideal seat: a window seat for him to lean one side of his shoulder against, ignoring the stain, the grease from oily heads, or insect crawling on the pane, which he could not tell it is glass or plastic.

But the bus was noisy, the chatter and laughter of a bunch of loud, gangling youth. The Young Relative would say, “These pasty faces deserve to be guillotined.” But they are only the chorus, the backup vocals to the mobile chirping of a North Indian woman.

The Young relative would say.” I hate those idiots who think it is only the migrant workers that are rowdy or loud, many expatriates are just as bad…” Young relative’s diatribe would usually go on and go.

At the evening of his life, at the age of 58, such issues are far from his thoughts.
This evening came gradually, the disappearance and appearance of the sun, can never be trapped by a single frame of his vision. The switch from day to night is not how we turn on/off a fluorescent ceiling light. The social angst like his ambition, in morning, has all faded into the background it had emerged from. During his 40s, it was grey; now in his 50s, the colour is at most off-white. The dream of space travel is now ridiculous; the trite dream of a million dollar account is greed, according to his faith, at least.

His angst and ambition like his physique and mental agility have been waning since middle age. Maybe it has something to do with his gene; some would blame it on his lifestyle, his diet, what time he sleeps, etc. At the evening of his life, his chief concerns are gaps. The gaps between the concrete kerb and the bus, the platform and the train; the gaps he could see between the seated passengers.

The Young Relative, who is not that young actually, once mentioned, “This curse’s intensity is defined by the number of days we spent on earth.” He was not following his train of thought.

Gaps - Smell

The original manuscript for Gaps, a prose of eight pages, cannot be recovered. After two weeks of procrastination, the writer came to the decision of presenting the fragments, inside his head, as fragments. Therefore, the debris, he could still find, would be presented as a series. The main reason is due to the difficulty of repeating the spontaneity, and flow of the original version, where different observations were linked chrono-analogically.

Gaps - Smell

Another morning, he made his way from the bedroom, passing the kitchen, to the toilet. The toilet facing the sink that is the toilet at the far end of the kitchen, next to the windows,
is the toilet shared by the eight members of the family:
5 children, wife, and dying mom.[1]

A young relative has come to a conclusion that the smell is
Not from the rubbish bin in the kitchen;
Not the plughole in the sink.
But the pale green mosaic tiles in the toilet.

Not the polished, well-glazed pieces on the wall, we feel with our fingers
But the matt and rough ones we step, with our toes grazed at times.

The grooves between the tiles that gave off the slight stench only outsiders are sensitive.


[1] The use of the adjective ‘dying’ is not a social-melodramatic attempt to evoke melancholy or sympathy. And by denying such attempt, it does not imply the opposing sentiment of indifference of, for instance, Meursault in Camus’s L’Stranger. It is merely to state a fact: the physical condition of his mom.

Borges on Wilde's Yellow Joke

Borges:...I remember a joke of Oscar Wilde's: a friend of his had a tie with yellow, red and so on in it, and Wilde said, "Oh, my dear friend, only a deaf man could wear a tie like that!"

He might have been talking about the yellow necktie I have now.

B: Ah, well. I remember telling that story to a lady who missed the point. She said, "Of course, it must be because being deaf he couldn't hear what people were saying about his necktie." That might have amused Oscar Wilde, no?

I'd like to have heard his reply to that.

B: Yes, of course. I never heard of such a case of something being so perfectly misunderstood. The perfection of stupidity. Of course, Wilde's remark is a witty translation of an idea; in Spanish as well as English you speak of a "loud colour." A "loud colour" is a common phrase, but then the things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
From an interview of Jorge Luis Borges in Latin Americcan Writers at Work (Modern Library: 2003, P.16)

Three Immediacies, Two denounced

In future, if I have the time to write,
I would like to write about the importance of ‘now’, as a practical concept
To denounce, every single strand of procrastination growing from my head, and around my chin, my fingers and shins.

In future, if I have the time to write,
There would another essay on our fetish for the ‘new’.
A topic mentioned before.
I want to murder before.

In future, if I do have the time to write,
I would like to confess my sin of ‘talking’, the sin of my speech ability.
I have recently classified this sin under ‘vanity’.
It is akin to flaunting one’s physical assets, flaunting inner appearance during dinner conversation.

A trained refusal to swear

Educated, a trained refusal to swear
But where did you learn your vulgar facial expressions from?

New Age, they called it.
Sure you are sensitive,
But you are only sensitive to yourself.
You are the new example of self-absorption.

Perfect grammar and good manners,
Nice features, perhaps
You laughed at what others were wearing,
or every lack you noticed in them.

Your expressions, moving the wrong muscles around your mouth and brows
betrayed your lack of sympathy, and the need to step on some shoulders to stand a little taller. Pathetic.

Educated, a trained refusal to swear
No big deal, my friend’s dog is toilet-trained.

Helot by George Friel

SHE stood at the window twisting the ring on her finger,
tugging the curtain, then twisiting her ring again....
the obvious rhyme is linger;
well, she lingered, she lingered there then:
tired as these words look tired, resentful as they,
at the slowing darkening of another Day.

The world was tired, trying to lean its weight on words,
and the words were tired too.
She saw what she had always seen,
an empty scene,
wearily answered No and yet admired too.

Words are tired things, resentful things:
that is why she never sings,
but rolls her necklace round her fingers,
life tied to a sequence as rhymes are tied.
So she lingers, knowing the rhyme is lingers,
standing at the window twisting her ring with tired
fingers.

(from A Friend of Humanity and other stories)
*Helot: a member of the lowest class in ancient Laconia, constituting a body of serfs who were bound to the land and were owned by the state.

At Sword Point by Victor Segalen

The Qianlong Emperor in Ceremonial Armour on Horseback, 1739 or 1758,
By Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name Lang Shining, 1688—1766).
Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk.
The Palace Museum, Beijing.1739 or 1758

We horsemen astride our horses, what do we know

about sowing? But any field that can be

plowed by horse hooves, any meadow that

can be galloped across,

We have trampled.



We do not stoop to build walls or temples,

but any town that will burn, with it temples

and walls,

We have burnt down.



We honor and cherish our women who are all of

high rank; but the others, who can

be tumbled, spread apart and possessed,

We have taken.



Our seal is a spearhead; our ceremonial dress,

armor starred with dew, our silk woven

from manes. The other kind, which is softer

and fetches a price,

We have sold.



(“At Sword Point,” from Victor Segalen, Steles, trans. Michael Taylor. San Francisco, Lapis Press, 1987, no pagination)

"With the exception of his anti-novel, René Leys (recently reissued by New York Review Books) and his studies of Chinese art (The Great Statuary of China and Paintings), most of Segalen’s writings on China – which come to some 1,000 pages in his two-volume Oeuvres complètes – remain untranslated into English. Stèles, first published privately in Peking in 1912 and then revised in 1914, has been better served in English translation, no doubt because its poetry offers a late Symbolist counterpart to Ezra Pound’s contemporaneous Cathay: previous translations include those by Nathaniel Tarn (1969), Michael Taylor (1987) and Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (1990). But it is only with Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush’s handsomely produced new critical edition that English-speaking readers can at last get a sense of the book’s exquisite layout through their en face facsimile reproduction of its original mise en page. As a physical objet d’art, the Peking edition of Stèles is an Oriental rarity worthy of the library of Des Esseintes – fin-de-siècle aestheticism here taken to extremes by its author’s fetishistic attention to the material textures of book production and design. Segalen had the first three dozen copies of the book printed on Korean imperial tribute paper made from silk floss and mulberry bark, the better to register the bleeding of type into the page. These pages were in turn pasted together to form a single long sheet of paper which was folded, concertina-style, on to itself – a technique traditionally used for Buddhist sutras but which also alludes to the infolded hymen or “unanime pli” of Mallarmé’s ideal inviolate Book. The volume was then bound with boards of camphor wood tied up with two ribbons of yellow silk and engraved with the title in both French and Chinese (the characters Gu jin bei lu, “A Record of Steles Old and New”). Segalen restricted the initial print run to eighty-one copies (nine times nine, the number of tiles on the roof of the inner palace of the Forbidden City) and, in the second edition, included sixty-four poems (eight times eight, the number of hexagrams in the Book of Changes). The silence that greeted the volume on its initial publication in 1912 was near total: Claudel, to whom the volume was graciously dedicated, took a year and a half to reply, and then only with faint praise; the only person to have fully grasped Segalen’s bibliographical experiment in cultural cross-dressing was the ever-alert Remy de Gourmont."

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3319242.ece?token=null&offset=12

the wells hidden at the corners of our eyes

Never spoken until it’s written
Eyes warmed by the well-chilled sentence

Nothing’s spoken unless it’s written
Eyes warmed then the wells beneath trickle

Now, to remember “there are invisible wells in her eyes”

When nothing’s broken when one’s told and bitten

Well, the cold trespasses, the cage of my ribs
But the armours we bought, how badly it fits

Time coating our shelves with dust
Time scraping our joy unknowingly

How many times, I don’t remember,
But I was warned about the impending rupture

… my reaction from 10 minutes of docudrama

This is just a reaction from the docudrama on Discovery Channel. It is about the impact if a huge comet were to hit earth; how the ecological system of our dear old mother earth would be screwed when shrouded from the sun; the catastrophic ecological chain reaction and so on. Although I caught only about ten minutes of the programme, I was, somehow, educated on the sun’s importance, how the earth species - which of course, included us - depended on it, and amazed by one particular species’ ability to imagine using scientific facts. Having often commented, and written my fair bit, against the sun I felt guilty for an hour or so.

The narrative script in the show caught my attention with its rhyming sentences. For example, the sentence which ends with the word ‘edible’ is followed by another that ends with ‘vegetable’, or the question if the earth can revived itself as a ‘time clock’ or remain as a ‘dead rock’. And perhaps this was what that had inspired the sentences inside my head when I am aware of how my guilt is obscene, driven, primarily, by one’s utilitarian concerns. I recognised that I need the sun to exist for, but not I do not “love the sun”, and I do not think I am suppose to feel any guilt towards things that I do not feel intensely for. Therefore, in order to not let myself sink further down into the “lower regions of the useful” (Kierkegaard) my refutation of the sun must remain.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful world
Isn’t this beauty?
…this end of your twirl

How many times have you reiterated?
The sun, the sun, and its importance to us

How many times have you repeated?

“Fuck Apollo! Fuck the tropical islands!
Fuck the tanned bodies!
The healthily tanned girls by the beach with sand on their hands and feet are
like brown muah chee salted by the sea.
(Fiffy, Muah Chee and the sand in that playground by Alan Bok).

“Fuck Mediterranean! Fuck California and the Caribbean islands!
Fuck Singapore and its eternal summer that has turned the
fashionable fools here to have an impure love for the rain -
all because of their love for this season’s autumn/winter collection.

Heat, solar energy, vitamin D, vegetation, water, the list goes on.
The million, billion reasons to love the sun
(Who loves the sun - Velvet Underground)
How impure to love it just because he can use it.
Here’s a classic case of how we tend to confuse love with needs.

“Fuck any sun inspired empire (J.G Ballard)”
His hatred of the sun turned him as pale as a vampire.

Plucked out for our salaried lives

Another morning, whereas the sun’s reluctance to rise, radiates as visual aids to our informal education on the magnificence of the aurora, my mom is, once again, her son’s short-term enemy. For the first five minutes of the day, mom is the point of his hatred; she is the one to be blamed because she is the one who is always there to remind him to pluck himself out of his bed. And it is always before the right time - time that would never be ripe enough - into the basket of another salaried day.

Before his pillow-marked face is washed; before his smoke-stained teeth are brushed, the concise diatribe, written in his ridiculous head (and often, hair) - that floats through the morning haze, and space, measured by the steps between the room and the bathroom sink - has a conclusion where the parallels between plucked-out-of-bed and being-thrown-into-existence is clear. Mom is the perpetrator of these two wrongs: wake and birth. Behind her façade of domestic care, ornamented with house chores and structured by motherly virtues, she is an agent of the spectacle; the administrator of thrownness. His continual suspicion of family members as the mutual agents of Capitalism is revitalised…

The running water, the few splashes, in flashes, such unfillial thoughts are washed down together with the nocturnal dust on his face, into the plug-hole once again. But like the little moles on his face, certain blemishes are here to stay. And with a friend who often agrees to parts of such conceptions, these moles can only grow more obvious than diminish into oblivion.

Therefore, as a disease bringing unease it persists, and as a song without a tune it continues.

I laughed at your one-liners, punchy salaried jokes which
filled the gaps of our silence with such salaried wits.

Salaried crowd, salaried cheers
Let’s forget the unpaid jeers

Salaried love
Salaried leisure

Salaried husband and salaried wife begets
A salaried child and salaried bliss

Salaried son, salaried dad

I despise your hopes, your taste and your dreams.

Salaried priest, salaried monk
preach us another salaried tranquillity
and devotion,
salaried emotion

Lunch with my salaried colleagues
Dinner with my salaried friends

Passing three packs of tissue clamped by a wrinkled hand,
I missed another opportunity to do salaried charity.

Where’s my attention? My salaried stare.

An excerpt from 'Pinafore'

Belonging to the noisiest places?
They listen to every shout from each other with attention given to the lightest whispers.

Plans for a private cult of happiness, or my sweet little fascist

the purity of Robespierre disturbed and turned
these virtues into terror... a terrible error.
his opposite, my sweet little fascist, is
a girl who refuses the handicapped as pets of her sympathy.
But this is not necessary
where the strong, the pretty, or lucky, as one against...
against those who were born to love the most touching loser songs.
Well, thanks to the guillotine, they heard the sound,
out from his lungs without passing through his throat,
And all thanks to Justin, we have heard enough
of her irregular breathing,
and of everyone's urge to hurt her wet cheeks.

Maps of our Shadows

Map to your face

Maps of our shadows

the floor plan of our future

drawn with our conversations without view of your features.

with your voice mesmerisingly detached,

it is the invisible line, puncturing through the chest to connect

us to our talks about travel,

us to our oneiric strolls along what happened to you before,

listening to what we are to see after.

Now we are glad, to remain at the depth of this place

where you agreed

too profane and too clumsy to name

Suffocated Sunflower

it's hidden, zipped inside my bag for two hours,
the suffocated sunflower
presented to you like a chrysanthemum in the dark
let's continue suffocating the impulses
for the health of our future

Tongue

Peripatetic irritation,
cuts the tongue of my bell.

Perennial mortification,
conversation – cuts my tongue in hell

for my walks in the gardens of dirty green – they attempt to manufacture lust
for my talks

of not fulfilling, those promises unsaid
of my desire to finally fulfill, these words unspoken

for our homeward walks,
for finality (as Kant was translated)
of what I remembered – to her I didn’t tell

Peripatetic irritation,
cuts my tongue in hell

for strolls in this garden, these vulgar flowers being gaudily bright
for stupid tropical sun, the unhealthy light

for all those heavens another he has promised
for the sound he made with the bell and his mouth

Perennial mortification,
skin contact – cuts the tongue of my bell

Moles and Typos

He was reading his text.

These typo errors, he counted them again and again. Too late it has been printed.
They are like the moles on his son’s face.

* * * * *

He stood and stared at those kids pole dancing inside the MRT.
He was irritated by their shouting, crying and laughing in enclosed spaces.

The things they laughed about, the things that fascinated them, the questions they asked, their erratic attention span; the imagination, of themselves in a plane, as a car, as the superhero. Of their unreliability… their cruelty, forgiven.

“Look at the gravy stain on his t-shirt; the mucous from the nose, the saliva; the two fingers in the mouth,” he said to himself.

“Why are we ok with them peeing in the public, into the gutter, indiscreetly?”

“The terrible posture…”

He bracketed off their age, their built, their gesture, and facial expression.
Or rather, he bracketed the behaviour and gesture and expression from the age, built and facial complexion. He replaced it with an adult. Isn’t that a madman?

He came to a conclusion: children are lunatics with a licence. They are the reckless cars with number plates but a threat to our lives.

Children: Authorised Lunatics.

Automatic Sliding Door - Ver. 2

I was sitting somewhere outside the shopping mall entrance, enjoying the condemned pleasures of being a smoker. I took the view in front me as just another insipid backdrop for another performance: all the people passing, regardless if they were smiling, deadpan, contemplative, chatting or shouting; fat, pretty, ugly, cute, unique, abnormal, trendy, geeky, young or old, were all seen as tepid performers for a stupid script, written by someone who, since the beginning of time, remains too afraid to show him/herself.

The entrance's sliding door caught my attention instead. I counted how many times this automatic door had opened conveniently for those entering the building, and needlessly for those passing by the door, yet close enough for the sensor to detect.

I thought to myself, "Poor, poor door, how often you have mistaken those passing by as wanting to enter.

“As sensitive as an automatic sliding door, he often mistook those who were passing as wanting to enter.”

I was reminded of the unnecessary gesture of those who spread their arms wide open to embrace old friends they met in the airport or merely bumped into - unnecessary for certain friends, I mean.