the first page of Resident, or Resident Evil, or This Minor Contextualisation of a Minor Temporality Known as Publishing on the Run, self-published 2022 (the copy for boat is the only time a delivery has completely failed)

dear h.,

the first disclaimer is that this letter is possibly not to only be read by you. i can imagine you might find some offense to that, but i realised like some strange twitch in me, there is something making me unable to face up to certain individuals on the ‘should reply to’ list, kind of like being less able to look at people in the eyes. and if i could only make this happen through finding a channel through a more general, faceless you to you, then it may only be this for the time being. looking aside from your eyes, there is a thing next to the thing. but it must be next to you.

i hope you may not be too offended and can find a way to understand this possibly strange manner of behaviour, perhaps a bit of a narcissistic reverse to the original request to hear more about you. i think most of what i saw and wrote before were also self-projections, which despite their reassurances makes me feel worse somehow, like not being able to look a you in the eye. that is why i said i will try to ‘face’, another way.

i ran into our mutual acquaintance Y last weekend and——in the same vocal paragraph of bemoaning the fact that people don’t read anymore——she was adamantly encouraging about continuing to write. so i try to readdress.

the last message you wrote was that _Friends are important. Especially nice if one doesn’t need to socialize to have them_ And it has almost come to this stage in life where one can say exactly that, like wise (and funny) C. noted so so long ago about knowing a good relationship when you can sit together in the same room together and feel comfortable not speaking to one another. more recently, W. discovered a version of it in the form of a named therapy called ‘body doubling‘, which is a less romantic, more production-oriented way of thinking about being together in a world that is absolutely not ‘together with it’. That goes back to the difficulties of being sad-core in a success-driven society, though one may also argue that success-driving is exactly what makes the fissures with sadness ever irreconcilable.

so go back to rhythm. 4/4 time is simply 4/4 time, but one can be-come another, there must be infinite transitions from the one to the other, right? Is this a silly metaphor? What makes you laugh these days, if you are still thinking about the point of humour? I actually really love your laugh. It’s more like a giggle or a chuckle, because you are generally a quiet person, and that is endearing coming from a man, if i can say that. An array of subtleties there, but maybe (another projection here) that combination of cynicism with humour is where our rapport found its place. i think i would define absurdity in such a way, but hope we can find some sort of specificity here that extends it beyond the nationalised version of which you spoke? Or maybe you’re right, as we are mostly so well trained now as ‘internet Americans’. That is the horrible contemporary universalism of language and humour buttressed by technology. Do you remember the very bad joke about Elaine and Coke that you shared with me when we first began talking more, from the ad campaign that was all over the city at the time? Something like that.

Another thought. That you can continue with the small joy you take from the live shows. Small joys is the same thought as rhythm, i think. So how to maintain the rhythm in which you can keep returning to that? Because of course it is so hard to see what small joy is in the midst of a dark refrain, or in the outburst of anger. I try my best not to react these days. Writing to you in this way is perhaps the same gesture of self-reflection while feeling terrible. So yes, I don’t know how to think too much about Kassel because it bore, in some ways, that feeling of rift. The core and the face alienated from one another in this overdramatisation of camaraderie that I wanted to partake in, but could only flitter about numbly because most of the things that were causing internal distress had nothing to do with the context at hand. Looking back now, perhaps I could have made better links between the core space and the extension of limbs. I don’t know how that would have been possible. I tried the direct confession to the best of my ability. I apologised. And still, I lost a friend. Too many accumulations of ‘created absence’ these years. That echo of emptiness is probably what rings this tinnitus.

About you at that time, I only felt that you were eager for having a real dialogue, which I would have wanted to do but can never do in those social situations because I want to try to take care of everyone——a mise en scène——only to end up failing mostly myself, of course. I didn’t feel anything destructive on your part, only that you were unable to read this from me and the situation, leading to your feeling of disappointment? what did you feel was destructive? were you upset?

i think you know yourself well enough to make choices that work fine for you given circumstances, but perhaps it is also about learning to rely more upon what we don’t know about ourselves, or about others… I wonder if Brasil was able to do that for you? You didn’t say too much about it. Someone said to me once that when he was young, he used to think that he was right, that it was the whole fucking world that had gotten it all wrong. But the older he became, things turned, and maybe it was that the rest of the world had it right, and he was the one who couldn’t figure it out. Years later, a young friend said with a grin to me that he hopes to keep finding himself wrong, because it’s when he feels that he’s more ‘right’ than everyone else that he’ll know he’s gotten too old. are you an old man yet, dear h?

Shall we meet (online) soon? Do you have non-socialising, body-doubling friends where you are now? Is it important for you to bring bodies and friend(s) and ideas and trust together into one room, and how do you go about doing that?

from another city,

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sometimes the fires cannot be fought,
in which case, you can also e-mail me at ho【愛特】iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter【點】net.
何穎雅 now in new territories.

the news makes me cry every morning

2021 July 01, Hong Kong

我剛剛下去樓下去買一罐啤酒「慶祝」今天的節日，在Circle K被找錢，發現其中包括了一塊1978年女英皇頭硬幣。回到我樓大廳，發現郵箱裡有妳寄過來的明信片，上面寫著「Still here」.

I just went downstairs to buy a beer to ‘celebrate’ the holiday today, and upon being given change at the Circle K, discovered amidst the coins one Queen Elizabeth head dollar dated from 1978. Returning back to my building, inside the post box was a postcard from you with a drawn eye of horus and the words, ‘Still here‘.

 

Posted by 丫 | reply »

“i still don’t think it is the good timing to talk about some personal matters during the war, but the war seems will last for a long time.”

i always think of you when i write. you.

to you.

you.

you.

you wish it was you, rather than just any old you, because that generic intimacy gets so tiring after awhile, or it’s what got you into trouble, a tiny, unnoticeable violence that you never realised would accumulate after so much time into that giant, violent thing that fell spilling on to the ground today (喂！你跌佐良心啊！).

a dichotomy of distance, ‘cuttings on the shop floor‘. it was me, as i wrote to a generic you (apparently called ‘vanilla’) that never understood how to distinguish between a friend, an accomplice, an acquaintance, someone we should have not wasted so much time on in the first place. on that side of the ocean they always laughed about it, quotation-marks-friend-quotation-marks filling the air in a disdainful, joking way.

yeah… it’s a loose term perhaps. look what’s happened to us. purple on one side, green on the other, jokes, the joker, shiso leaves.

i finally finished that jar of pickled shiso that K had made me, long after he had gone. guess we are all supposed to hate him now, just disappearing like that, but the shiso was so tasty and he had been so sweet and eager to make it for me before i left that day, i couldn’t help but hold a soft spot for him. it turned out to be the last time we would see one another.

at the time he was like a boy and a master, chopping the leaves finely with that sort of precision that always made you think of Q’s story about the butcher and 道 the tào. K proudly handed me the square plastic jar labelled with a little sticker bearing his name on it, instructing that if i had a stone i could clean it and put it in the jar as well; pressing down the leaves enhances the flavour. in the end the juice can be used also, so there, in the end, i poured out the last drops of bright pink pickling sap onto a bright purple and green salad, and together they made me think of the colour of an aura (you). A possible colour which i had never been able to see before myself but had been described to me by that blonde couple staring wide-eyed, many years ago, at some tinted space just a bit off from direct eye contact, in that way that some blind people do.

maybe my aura had bled out. fled, as sure-footed as he was when he left her, and now he’s off in some Wong Kar Wai movie, the one that’s tinted a muted aqua-grey colour, with lots of stony blues pressing down to enhance the flavour. he unhooked himself from her; she is pregnant and going to marry all of her ‘friends’ instead. but how do we unhook ourselves from ourselves? that bright purplish-pink is gone and filled only with the headache of being awake.

do you remember when we talked about being woke? what a funny presumption, don’t you think? i feel more ‘awake’ than ever before, and it’s shitty to not be able to sleep even if it increases the number of episodes for ‘things i don’t know‘ playing on repeat. the same same collapses in upon itself.

later, she wrote: ‘Stay fiery. I went to a Naomi Klein talk with sheets Thunberg last night and she reminded us the way to fight fire is with fire. 🔥 ‘

but the same same collapses in upon itself. it is just so hard to stay fiery. these weekends going out there, out there, around and behind and on the margins of front, the smell, these acculturations that kill me. weekend weekend, monday to friday. it had dawned upon me, after the summer of discontent, that the problem right now is that all that practice that i had built a practice upon didn’t make sense anymore. like i used to dislike contractions, and now they’re here all over the place, sense changes. is she more awake now, now that she is pregnant and he’s gone off to the Philippines? Where is that collusion between all those baby details we once found god in, and, baby mama, this big shit of a mess we’re in now?

Posted by 丫 | reply »

while waiting for responses

…something broke and something could put it back together

 

the glass lid of a pot fell to the ground, but only the spacing broke

“together” brand adhesive tape

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nusantao and a trans-pacific dialogue with Chris Kraus

dirty south.

In a hypothesis developed by Wilhelm Solheim, the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network (NMTCN) is a trade and communication network that first appeared in the Asia-Pacific region during its Neolithic age, or beginning roughly around 5000 BC. “Nusantao” is an artificial term coined by Solheim, derived from the Austronesian root words nusa “south” and tao “man, people”.

— filed under “Nusantao”, Wikipedia

the spread in many directions as “a kind of excuse to party, right“, T. commented, and W. agreed, even though she was disappointed that nobody was listening, and even though she wanted to find some theoretical right to party, like a Brechtian sausage.

— 恩斯特·布洛赫

There would not have been a French Revolution, as Marx stated, without the heroic illusions that natural law engendered. Of course, they did not become real, and what did become real of them, the free market of the bourgeoisie, is not at all that which was dreamed of, though wished for, hoped, demanded, as utopia. Thus now, if a world were to emerge that is hindered for apparent reasons, but that is entirely possible, one could say, it is astonishing that it is not——if such a world, in which hunger and immediate wants were eliminated, entirely in contrast to death, if this world would finally just “be allowed to breathe” and were set free, there would not only be platitudes that would come out at the end and gray prose and a complete lack of prospects and perspectives in regard to existence here and over there, but there would also be freedom from earning instead of freedom to earn, and this would provide some space for such richly prospective doubt and the decisive incentive toward utopia that is the meaning of Brecht’s short sentence, “Something’s missing.” This sentence, which is in Mahagonny, is one of the most profound sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words. What is this “something”? If it is not allowed to be cast in a picture, then I shall portray it as in the process of being (seiend). But one should not be allowed to eliminate it as if it really did not exist so that one could say the following about it: “It’s about the sausage.” Therefore, if all this is correct, I believe utopia cannot be removed from the world in spite of everything, and even the technological, which must definitely emerge and will be in the great realm of the utopian, will form only small sectors. That is a geometrical picture, which does not have any place here, but another picture can be found in the old peasant saying, there is no dance before the meal. People must first fill their stomachs, and then they can dance.

— Ernst Bloch

W.’s trauma of not being heard was a structural problem as much as a genetic defect, more recently amplified by contemporary notions of #fomo, post-maturity and the simple fear of being lost and forgotten and useful to no one.

S. was then of an age where she thought about age at least eight times a day. Having spent parts of her life in New York and LA, she knew where she was “from” didn’t much matter. When she was a student at Wellington High School, S. recalled being told by the head English teacher, a salt-and-pepper-haired man in baggy black-and-white tweeds who’d published critical essays on D.H. Lawrence, that because of her emigration from the US at such a formative age, she had no nationality and therefore, despite her interest in literature, could not be a writer [see further at 版本 version 3.0]. Which is to say, S. had lived through various eras including the demise of nationalism.

— from Absolute Love, by Chris Kraus (Scary Topiary Press, 2016)

Unfortunately nationalisms have not really died if we are still looking for these genealogies of belonging, southern girl, and you empathised with O.’s alienation even though he talked about love and hate in a way that made you hate him. later, W. made a transnational gift of O.’s art object produced by W.’s semi-anonymous collective, her shy prefaces leading T. to make fun of W. because of her need to make a “finished product”. These are all various forms of trade and transaction, not so dissimilar from the way that cultures and identities and forms of belonging happen over time, across oceans. so while W. becomes a businesswoman she finally realises that her roots are not merely ethnic as much as gender-specific and class-based, contaminated, kind of like ‘dirty south’.

 

— “Southern Girl” by Rahzel feat. Erykah Badu, from the 1999 album Make the Music 2000

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seven days for désiré[e] (don’t pull away)

she called it a challenge in black and white, the days numbered incorrectly, but the rules repeated. seven seven seven seven seven seven seven days, seven seven seven seven seven seven seven photos of your everyday life. no explanation, no people.  supposed to challenge a friend to join, so 點, a?

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filled with initials and dotted with territories (for aka-chan)

Dearest aka-chan,

Has it been a big year for you, preceding and to come after the day yesterday which was indeed a day? i think about you often this year, you know, something like the distance of six months and the time of always. it makes me happy your daughter declares you are four years-old this time.

Actually, i celebrated your day in the city where we travelled, four years and 11 months ago. i wrote a message to z and we will meet after the 14th of this month. and probably i will meet mevrouw a at the beginning of next month. and f later in that month. but there are many more initials that have been lost, and sometimes this feels like the ocean, sometimes it feels sad. but i still don’t want to admit regret, so last week i visited an ocean filled with initials and dotted with territories, an ocean that knows very vast and very small at the same time.

At the bottom of a granite hill, there are many seafood restaurants which make this area a popular place to visit. you have to pass through small alleyways filled with creatures in glass tanks, and when you see a jade green postbox you can turn slightly to the right, then keep walking to get to the sea. this is one of the old postboxes from the colonial era, one of only seven left in the city bearing the cipher of King George V, but its freshly painted green-blue is really just a bad moustache.

when you emerge from the alley and arrive at the ocean, actually it looks not so much like the sea but a river. There is another bank with another hill on the opposite side, with granite that is identically uniform and equigranular (the average grain size is just over 2mm) to the granite on this side. There are some aunties and uncles playing cards on this side. Maybe there are on the other side, too. Although it is less than 500 metres across to the other side, it is wide enough not to see aunties and uncles over there. But my aunt used to live on that side, maybe only for about one or two years. Now she lives closer to this side, closer to where our family grew up, which maybe makes sense because here we are at the gateway for the Fujianese immigrants coming into the city. There were also many immigrants from Chiuchow, which is further east and further north from here as you keep heading along the coast. If you keep going further and further east and further and further north, you will arrive in Japan, and it is through this gateway that many Japanese merchants also passed, as well as Portuguese merchants on their way back from Japan.

The ocean is very vast. But here it is very small, less than 500 metres across, and there is a small temple for the goddess 天后 Tinhau. Actually, it is better luck to call her 媽祖 Matsu. She is the goddess of the seafarers, and you will find many temples in this region dedicated to her. Once i visited her island and sat on the cliff of her knees, looking over to China. I fell asleep at one point, and when I awoke, I was in China. Twice when people awoke here, they saw Matsu resting in the clouds——once in 1953, the year my mother was born, and once just last year, when I was halfway between here and Japan.

If you entered the harbour from the east, perhaps Chiuchow or Fujian or Japan, her presence at this gateway would have calmed you, and upon passing through the inlet the water would have indeed been calmer, and you would have rested easy only to be ransacked by the pirates watching from above on the granite hill. there have been gangs and clans and colonisers here, changing hands and moving around for longer than we know. there have been territories since the beginning of these beginnings… something is always east to somebody else. sometimes the view is long and vast, and sometimes it is less than 500 metres across.

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