Jumping

If there must be a reason accorded to every action, always at least a cause to every state of being, then the reason I am writing this is due to my twin fears. The first is the fear of my tendency to jump over the parapet, and the second is the fear of what my tendency would be misunderstood as. For most probably, if I do jump, I will not live to explain my act. The most regrettable is for the decision (suicide) to be taken as a desperate measure. Like the suicide of an abuse foreign maid or worker; the family suicide of those Taiwanese with credit card debts; the naive suicide of a lovesick teen; the suicide driven by bereavement or rape; the suicide of an angst-ridden powerless young man, akin to those suicide bombers; the suicide of a melancholic artist or poet wannabe; the logical suicide of an existentialist… My dad especially would want to believe it is his stupid son over love. Maybe, some of my friends would have regretted why they didn’t do what those around Don Quixote had done – burning those books I like to read. However, my intention which would result in killing, or more fortunately, crippling myself (depending on the height and what I have landed on) is really driven by none of the above. Of course, maybe, there is a certain amount of influence, from those books, songs or films that I have digested, but I am not totally conscious of them when such a thought cross my mind. And to a certain degree, I will not even want to call it an intention when it is actually a matter of tendency. It is a desire, not unlike those that belong to the Eros, but with a greater moral permissibility, that certainly is a taboo to any sensible existence. It is an urge akin to the one that compelled me, at the age of about ten, to staple my finger when I was in the class, the temptation to touch the flame of the lit candle on the dining table in a dark restaurant; of the oil lamp on the altar. It is the sinful inclination to think and say all the contraries while praying in the temple. The outburst of laughter and nonsensical gestures when one is trapped in the theatrical seriousness of a job interview, a meeting with clients, or a solemn event like funeral procession. It is what impels one to touch the chest of a female stranger, though not due to sexual impulse but just the urge to perform all the wrong behaviours (or father’s arse, in the most erotic manner while one is fascistically homophobic). It is the disgust of molesting a middle age retard, or an old and dirty woman vagabond when one’s libido is actually low, and when they are definitely not to one’s taste. It is the crime, sin and guilt of attacking my granny and her age-induced physical fragility (like those racial riot lynching) during one of my filial visits which often makes everyone, including me happy and grateful, that I am coerced to bear. It is the betrayal, of laying your brother’s wife when you never had a lust or feeling for her. It is him exhibiting when he is always the polar opposite of an exhibitionist. It is the fault to juxtapose all my most respected with the profane (gods, parents, close friends, and lover… with beggars and etc.) on a long awaited Holy Saturday, which is my propensity to make the leap.
Now, let us go back to the influences. I will not deny that the idea of jumping is pure, without any influences at all. The impulsiveness of George Bendemann, in Kafka’s The Judgement, always lingers in some corners of my mind. And all the more the graphic element of that scene is something I owed to my first encounter with the story in illustrated form. However, for one to be influenced by an idea, one must already possessed something similar, or something that reacts to it. My tendency to touch the limits, the end point, to staple myself was before my encounter, shows it is innate. Rather, my encounter with the story, or what I recently read in Bataille's essay on Kafka, is a form of clarification, a naming process: a name to the person who has been around, a new found term to describe a particular expression or gesture that I have been making, a realisation of what that corner of the wall is called. Where all the thoughts and tendencies are given a narrative: a word, a term, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a book, or a more organised and coherent idea. One pleasure of encountering new thoughts is the joy of finding ideas that we always have thought about but in other versions, which are usually prior and more refined and more in depth, and from a more credible position. This is one way how one chooses a author ones like, or a politician that I elect to represent my voice. Thus, my influences are in a way not what change me instead it grooms what I already am. Like what she said, according to her Theory for a Garden, it is the right seeds in the suitable soil and climate.
What is important in Bataille’s reading of the story, what has he named and clarified for me is a jump beyond melancholy, and for him, evident by what Kafka told Max Brod, the ‘violent ejaculation’, the relation to sovereignty and eroticism (thought Bataille denies the claim). Somehow, all this made me rethink of all these plunges that were made. The tragic plunge in by a character in a short story by Dostoevsky, the plunge I witnessed at the opposite block, the plunge on TV (911 man falling) and now the only one with wings to survive a Fall. My tendency and fear of jumping, the height which is the fear and temptation at once…