You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.

The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.

But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.

Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.

I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.

…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.

–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video

I had no idea what he was talking about, really. Reverberations pass away easily, behind the ears, at pressure points, when cooking. Roles are performed in adequate fashion, resulting in countering feelings of inadequacy, words flow, nothing is communicated. The treatise is about performance, perhaps. Insinuation of a guise, this is not real, whichever how you really feel. No, really. Keeping it real.

Had no idea what i was talking about really. Sometimes the emotions would arise, and one would find oneself unable to act appropriately, a subjective propriety, a nicety. Trying not to look too hard at his pimples. The palimpsest of his pimples, because even thirty-somethings get them, oh yes, renewal, we can feel like teenagers again and again and over again.

Your postmaturity, maybe. Treatises that we haven’t written yet, half-thoughts, names dropped, another drifting off on the bus again. No, there. When the girl with the ponytail steps on my foot in the bus, I notice her, her captivated audience of fellow passengers, a spectacle in action. She is playing paper-rock-scissors with a boy shorter than her, perhaps that is what it makes it more obvious that he is cheating the game, as his eyes steal glances upwards on every count, towards her poised hand, ready to draw. If he is quick he can change his draw at the last moment, just after he’s seen her paper or rock or scissor coming down like an absurd call of judgement. His is fickle and cunning at the same time. Paper wraps around rock. But each time the breath before the draw is prolonged just a bit longer; she knows his game. He knows she knows his game. And the game shifts a little bit, bus ride bumpy, to a different battle of suspense: who will cheat on the other first. the classic grid of one to another strategy, don’t call it war, it’s just the way things are. remember that lecture that we went to where you didn’t understand? Punnett for non-pundits, I’m on the bus and I could observe this moment for hours. fault or fancy? their fists are suspended in mid-air, holding on a bit longer than forever. this is a treatise on the university of disaster.

“But when we begin to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present, the contemporary, becomes important, even central for us. This is because the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision—by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. And that is precisely what the contemporary is—a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay. Søren Kierkegaard famously asked what it would mean to be a contemporary of Christ, to which his answer was: It would mean to hesitate in accepting Christ as Savior. The acceptance of Christianity necessarily leaves Christ in the past. In fact, Descartes already defined the present as a time of doubt—of doubt that is expected to eventually open a future full of clear and distinct, evident thoughts.”

–boris groys, comrades of time

Michael writes to H.F:  “We enjoy the space between being ‘in the know’ and simply being attentive to one’s social environment where the unexpected may occur, setting up an interaction that will provide a meaningful communication, ‘loading the decks’.”

It ends with a face in rain, or two, that washed away one after the other like passing faces in a party.

The next day, he sends me a message: “One day I will explain to you why things are so complicated.”

And then it becomes difficult to respond, silence an only recourse, uncovering to plot thickening. The loneliness amidst joyful crowds, like the stripping away of an impersonator who says, “I don’t know. I was born that way.”

People ask questions all the time to which we must answer, “I don’t know.” I can’t remember anymore which way it was when i was born, but somehow I always return to a letter read as a child, from an old woman. I read her as if I were her already, so confounded by the inexplicability of my thoughts, to the possibility of their being expressed. It seems now, in future, utterly impossible to answer any question asked of me. I find less and less the words to place the complexities of my feeling.

Perhaps now back outside of each of those moments, I could answer each of you in turn, eloquently and honestly. Like an old woman’s remembrance of the sound of a black-capped chickadee, a doing nothing kind of being or simply, so simply, the fullness of…

to write when one is wordless, or just exhausted, as promotional can be, wordless, blowing, hot air on a very cold day.

Wear journal is now available in Shanghai at 渡口书店 Dukou bookstore and in North America via Textfield distribution.

(photo from the ‘wüste der moderne’ exhibition, must be in the 1950s somewhere in north africa)

it’s been a long time (每只蚂蚁都有眼睛鼻子)… southside neighbour says our house’s coffee is so fragrant (它美不美丽偏差有没有一毫厘有何关系), and i can smell your breath every time i think of you, the last shock that you’ve been a grown man for a long while now, and it was something i never knew (每一个人伤心了就哭泣). does being near you change, the smells of the same old street at different hours of the day (饿了就要吃相差大不过天地), does it feel comfortable over the phone (有何刺激), even if she is waiting?

it’s been a long time (太多太多魔力太少道理)… a 500ml jar with a rubber stopper (太多太多游戏只是为了好奇), it was nicer to be a bit more abstract but he wanted to smell it. unfortunately, it was exactly that supposedly removed. Scent travels through air (还有什么值得歇斯底里). Your hair is longer and more done-up now, even in the windy streets out there, the clicking of your low-heeled boots, I like the awkwardness of getting to know you. It’s almost as good as knowing you too well, when we don’t have to speak anymore, and it doesn’t feel bad to not know what you’re thinking (对什么东西死心塌地). Thank you and no, no no.

It’s been a long time (一个一个偶像都不外如此) …to feel ill (沉迷过的偶像一个个消失), my throat hurting after sitting with you all wet through dinner. You didn’t know I was completely soaked, but the food was spicy and you asked awkward questions after I showed you my work (谁曾伤天害理谁又是上帝), and then I met your friend and we didn’t eat until just before the moment of missing the last train (我们在等待甚么奇迹). It’s been a long time since I came this way, and he uses his new car to pick up rides in the evening, A bit of extra spending money (最后剩下自己舍不得挑剔). don’t fall asleep on your way home, okay?

It’s been a long time (最后对着自己也不大看得起)… I try to use the right pronouns in the right places this time (谁给我全世界我都会怀疑), your loving of my use of “we” means that it is all i can offer, all that i hoped for (心花怒放却开到荼蘼). We is I or I is we. We is I is we is I is we. I thought about it in the shower when I came home (一个一个一个人谁比谁美丽), I thought about the most memorable showers I’ve ever taken (一个一个一个人谁比谁甜蜜), I thought about what it would be like to be you, I thought about taking back some of the things I’ve learned over these years (一个一个一个人谁比谁容易).

the sky, really, they say…

(又有什么了不起/每只蚂蚁和谁擦身而过/都那么整齐有何关系/每一个人碰见所爱的人却心有余悸)

[《开到荼蘼》 曲编: c.y. kong 词: 林夕]

and hope you are having a good time, well into your 30’s—-knowledge and wisdom much further beyond… 生日快乐 happy birthday, rl… muchlovefromafar