iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter. » lonely


the blog below is written from beijing, new york, vienna, sendai, thessaloniki, tokyo, berlin, osaka and zürich. there are a few of us, and this is the space in between.



不用老对我那么乐观, will i ever get tired of trying?

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]

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whatever singularities (hurrah for you and me and you and you and you)

Whatever singularities cannot form a societas within a society of the spectacle because they do not possess any identity to vindicate or any social bond whereby to seek recognition. …The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging (just like Cantor’s inconsistent multiplicity). The whatever singularity—-this singularity that wants to take possession of belonging itself as well as of its own being-into-language, and that thus declines any identity and any condition of belonging—-is the new, nonsubjective, and socially inconsistent protagonist of the coming politics.

–from “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle“, Giorgio Agamben

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for severality, on fragility 1

To sustain fragility, a stamp on the box or the curiosity of half-opened contents. She says it is a trauma, beyond or prior to event, infliction in mere seconds or unconscious years, is p(h)ys(ch)ical.

He shudders in late afternoon half-sun. Sometimes, somewhere else and longing to be repeated, never repeated, she recoils, not horror. Those prickling sparks of the nerves they call falling asleep, …i’m exhausted.

Fragility means that you might find yourself not on the subjective level (coming, pre-, before you), we are partial to (one another) and we are partial (a many subjectivities). The pieces lay strewn and ambitious! What is already fragmented can beg a prism-like movement, sometimes slight twisting of the wrist to open a new light, from Levinas’ very first illumination (but in the refusal of darkness).

Once we saw three at once, a tunnel lining an enormous thundering sky, and we drove through them all.

—-not a means to an object, we pass through what passes through us. Fragility, the broken glass after the break, under but begging the open, makes transparent without needing to be seen. But it is not concealment as such (those chatting at the bar simply do not notice), nor a state to induce fascination (stillness, displacing life) so much as laying bare, not bare or just being there, in the middle of an ongoing process. The prolongation of fragility is not a state of being, but may find itself in the invisible inconsistencies of ritual, the anticipation or the suspension of an event. Its fascinance can never be an isolated moment, for it can only exist in relation to the other, as cause or affect or the relinquishing notion of wanting to be part of all of you. That longing, whether in pain or love, is more real that real itself, for it is the realm of the possible-not-yet.

Fucking phantasy! I owe you one.

1 Martin Hielscher, Hiroaki Kanai, Sean Smith, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Pierre Huyghe, Bracha Ettinger

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falling and falling (and hanging on)

hangingontogether.jpg.hangingon1.jpg.afterthefall.jpg

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frozen


it’s just too sad sitting lonely in a cold night like this. go home, dear.

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to inhabit an empty time

swings

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a bird’s move

a bird move

one darn cold day a bird landed there soon another bird landed there the right one started to approach only to find with every inch he moved leftward she moved an inch leftward it was a darn cold day with sand, wind, no sunshine he moved leftward and she too one minute felt like one whole day she took off she flied away here he was, lonely, wondering why

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jitsu wa, dan dan kowaku natte kita.

asuka_hospitalwaiting.jpg this is from anyway, who, suffering from technical difficulty, had to wait [photo above from 'daily fable', please see post a few below]. matte kudasai. yes, yes, everyday. it wasn’t until s-san with the beautiful xinjiang face asked, so… have you met anybody yet, that i felt the tremendous… waiting until the words come to me, alles wat ik niet kan zeggen, but now i write love letters to strangers everyday in banal places. make friends with the toy dispenser, make friends with the supermarket aisles, with the sound of my new bicycle’s squeaky brakes. our relationships change. the waiting room of the hospital i have not seen yet. oh, but i have seen the future… a private joke in het openbare ruimte. the text was already up in the drafts before you asked.

alles_wat1.jpg we’ll know each other better, i hope, even if you never receive my letters. 你吃了吗?

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jan (some say a sorry is all it takes)

qiao.jpg

wednesday. i meant to post more on wednesday. but i forgot to buy electricity. again. another romantic candle-lit evening for one, making your absence all the more present. jan. we spent a whole day together on wednesday. i was half an hour late and half an hour early. she always amazes me. she is in her mid-sixties and usually works seven days a week, traveling all over china for her job on the weekend. i found out she studied japanese for three years and she recently applied for a job in a small town near sapporo. she’s interested in ainu culture. she says the people she knows in japan are not into art and culture so it is difficult to find people to take her to museums when she is there. she feels japanese are less into their own culture than the chinese. this makes her sad. she took me to hip bellagio restaurant across the street from her house. we shared crispy fried doufu. she has funny hair. it’s shaved at the bottom all the way round and she ties the rest up into a short ponytail on the top of her head. her hair is white with strands of grey. it’s hard to imagine her with different hair. she gets lonely sometimes. she prefers loneliness in china to loneliness in australia. we went to the toy market together. i was her bargain girl. i’m really good when i’m buying for other people. we bought tiny toy cars, a wooden domino choo-choo train, a wooden calendar, a suspension bridge, wooden shoes to practice tying your laces, a horse, a wooden bottle game, a wooden chocolate cake and a wooden strawberry cookie baking set. and i bought london bridge for myself to use in class. when we got back to her house i asked her if i could stay another five minutes to look at the cookie baking set. i love the eggs. they come in a tiny carton of six and you can separate them into an egg white part and an egg yolk part. i forgot. but she mentioned it again. she was teaching ‘i get tired of’ because she says it all the time. and a four-year-old says: “i get tired of japan”.egg.jpg

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face up, eyes closed, thinking about looking at the sky

wan_test1.jpg

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