Life of the Bourgeoisie

It's a damn good life.
Life of masturbation,
Life of indulgence of the mind.
I wouldn't wish any other life for myself.

The ultimate pleasure in life is having the time to contemplate the nature of pleasure.
The ultimate pleasure in life is having time!
Having time to make choices.
Having choices!
To be!

But let's not forget that we are really in the "ruling class,"
That we ought not forget how the vast majority of fellow brothers live,
We must not become all self-servingly consumed,
Turning to our pains and sufferings are mere vanities.

We have to care truly for the poor,
To feel their misery,
To conjecture their misery,
To offer assistance,
To forbear interference.

But no Man can witness the dying innocent without the deepest existential anger,
Except those who are zealously fanatical; for they truly are not Men.
Isn't it human nature to empathize?
Isn't it human nature to do?
Isn't it human nature to feel compulsion?

But let's not stand on the pulpit called "nature,"
How many mistakes have Men made in the name of "essence"?
Gather like the tenacious squirrel,
Spread thy nuts in many holes,
But do this without seeking requital.

The bourgeois wise man is a contradictory man,
Self-limiting yet with imperial desires for everything.

Spreading likens man to "nature,"
Containment likens man to "god."
For god is stoicism practiced as nature.

Self-limiting-walking-sensing-conscious-thinking-matter,
A bourgeoisie's life.

As for humanity, must we always have the foie gras?
(For have we duties to those who are not dutiful?)

"this little day of mine"

Stoney brook, whirling wheels, flexing muscles.
Rays beam, shadows cast.
Breath, eat, think, sleep.
Accidents follow and heap, it leads and gives.
Thanking merely, doing profoundly.
Repeat.

Haunting

"What's the Word?" disciple asked.
Digits frigid, orifice hallowed, liquid congealed,
Master lay dying.
Always there, look elsewhere.

Small and pliant,
Milky white, verdure moss, auburn muck.

Massive and steely,
Metallic jet, calendered chrome, geometric monolith.

The double,
Mirror image.
Hopes for past,
Memories of future.

Scale, reflect, rotate, translate.
d o g
D O G
D O 9
6 O C|
G o d

Master breathed,
"Repeat."

speed queen Drying Tumbler

Tumbling.
Front to back,
Outside then in,
Swirls within swirling,
Matter coveting Nothing.


Flaxen maiden outstretched briefly,
Acrobat thrust into moist air,
Wheel spun gerbil landing.

One segment now visible,
Rolled and sucked into void.
Disappeared.
Huff,
Puff.
The seen reappears,
always there.

Heaven's spring thaws the coagulate,
Passionate red vignettes an alabaster vat,
Streams forming, speeding to Vortex Queen.
Ink dries the insufferable cauldron of paradoxing.

"Embrace!"
Wails in vacuo.

Politics of Forgetting

As long as humans can remember, memory has been a problem. The knowledge of the problem of memory itself testifies to this fact. If I had no memory, I would not know that memory is a problem. That is to say: the knowledge of the problem of memory stands in the way of curing itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a wonderful article (his second Untimely Meditation) pressing home the point that everyone must take a teaspoon of "unhistory" in order to live a healthy life. He was writing in an age where history was becoming the byproduct of every thought. The 19th century believed you could know everything by historicizing it. Nietzsche, the rebel that he always was, cried out against this practice. He believed that too much history would suffocate life. If you live in the past too much, then you would never be free to experience the present and future. We must be able to forget in order to carry on with our lives.

I fully agree with Nietzsche. I hear his holler echo all the way from the 19th century and enter to my heart. I too must learn to forget things. I too must lay down my past that so often can tear me down and keep me anchored like a ship in the middle of an ocean. The good memories and the sad ones must learn to obey the present and instead of tyranizing it.

But now I ask: how are we to do this? How could I ever forget?

Early in Shakespeare's play, Macbeth hears a prophecy from the Weird Sisters. The memory of this prophecy and the desire to see this prophecy fulfilled tortures the ambituous man to the end of his reign as king. Late in the play, Macbeth pleads with his doctor, when he hears that his wife is starting to go crazy:

“Cure her of that," he begs,

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?"

To which the Doctor replies: “Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.”
(Shakespeare, Macbeth, V, 3, 40-46)

The doctor speaks paradoxically. How could the patient minister to him or herself? To forget one's memory would be to cut off one's head. Once the act is performed, the object upon which the act had been performed is immediately extinguished. If I really forget something, then I must also forget the act of forgetting. In other words: if I have ever successfully forgotten a memory, I would not know that I actually did. This is precisely Augustine's point in his unforgettable tenth book of his Confessions: “I can mention forgetfulness," he writes,

"and recognize what the word means, but how can I recognize the thing itself unless I remember it? I am not speaking of the sound of the word but of the thing which it signifies. If I had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to recognize what the sound implied. When I remember memory, my memory is present to itself by its own power; but when I remember forgetfulness, two things are present, memory, by which is what I remember it, and forgetfulness, which is what I remember. Yet what is forgetfulness but absence of memory? When it is present, I cannot remember. Then how can it be present in such a way that I can remember it? […] Are we to understand from this that, when we remember it, it is not itself present in the memory, but it only there by means of its image? For if forgetfulness were itself present, would not its effect be to make us forget, not to remember?”
Augustine, Confessions, X, 16, S. 222

Now, the critically inclined might object. "But we do forget things!," he would say. "Just a few days ago I forgot my keys! So there. Theory invalidated."

But wait. To this objection, I would reply: No, you can't remember that you forgot your keys a few days ago! You only appear to know that you forgot your keys, because you noticed after you left your apartment that something was missing. But go ahead and try to remember when you forgot the keys. Exaclty at what point did you forget the keys? Was it before you brushed your teeth? Or while you were closing the door? Or maybe in between? Forgetting is not an active act. You cannot remember forgetting, because you didn't do it actively. Forgetting is a lack of something. Trying to remember when you did not pick up your keys is a foolish riddle. It didn't happen, so you can't remember it!

*

At the very end of Odyssey, Odysseus comes home and slaughters all of the suitors that have been courting his wife while he was at sea. While he goes to see his father, the families of the slaughtered ones hear about Odysseus' deed. They want revenge. And so they make a charge for Odysseus and his father. Athena, the goddess who always kept her eye out for Odysseus, see the scene unfold and shortly before it all comes to a climax she begs Zeus to take action and help Odysseus:

“'My child', Zeus […] replied, '[…] Now that royal Odysseus has taken revenge, let both sides seal their pacts that he shall reign for life, and let us purge their memories of the bloody slaughter of their brothers and sons.” XXIV, S. 483)

In order for peace to rest in the land, Zeus and Athena must purge the memories of all involved. The only way to introduce peace is with the politics of forgetting. But note! It is not the humans who do the forgetting. It is Zeus who purges the memory. Yes Nietzsche, I'm all with you. But we need the power of a god to de-historicize us. This divine act cannot come from our own powers.

To truly forget, to truly "pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow", we need to usher in a god.

a marxist manifesto

Be serious about life! Believing and caring about what one does. To become completely cynical about life and society is to exterminate all hope or indeed even all notions of utopia. Hasn't control and stability become the dominant feelings of our contemporary existence? Here (or rather for me, there), everything is a joke, all mirages, all is frivolous, ironies everywhere - the pinnacle of post-modernity. Blindness! Do not take the simulacrum as a pre-given, a dogma, for it is the symptom of illness! Don't confuse the oppressed subject as the failed subject. Take up the motto of the Enlightenment again "Sapere Aude!" Overcome the spiritless Zeitgeist! Periodically the consciousness of society must be awakened to face itself again. To witness itself and all its self-induced farces. Be serious and see the world we have created! To be ultimately cynical and ironic means the acceptance of your impotence. Make all things transparent and do not laugh at those who in sincerity believes in the human possibilities. Projection of God doesn't give one transcendent sight, only immanent blindness! The tragic is not our relationship to God but our relationship to ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw

the lyric moment

As I sat outside on the steps to the backyard this morning, imbibing cheap instant coffee mixed with a drop of blood of some poor farmerand munching a somewhat stale P&J (that got dropped onto the ground just secs before), all consumed by Mozart's Requiem... I had a lyric moment (sun before me, warmth upon me, harmony within me, it and me, it it it it it... no no, me me me me me....)

Is this not the pure bourgeois? Man confronts the beautiful without? Who then contemplates his loss from the Mother (why did you forsake me Mother?). Who rejoices upon finding her, but realizes he is forever banished from her, masturbates to achieve her... Zizek, I think in the Guide, pointed to the horrific moment during coitus when one realizes the utter absurdity of the mechanical. Do we not constantly work towards the splurt? That paradoxical moment of both attainment and disillusion? Oh great Sisyphus, roll not the boulder, let the boulder roll over you.

For a moment, death, horror, injustice, perished... But here, and there; precisely everywhere; the alienation! Is my remorse not the symptom of an alienating/alienated world? If humanity has anything to achieve, is it not to alienate alienation? To banish the logic of the bourgeois? So we may stare deeply into the Mother and scream "I have murdered thee!"

Depression and Ecstacy: a conversation on Short scenes for Phillip's upcoming montage of the unconscious

There we sat, across from each other, offset by one seat. I was bent over reading, eyes glued to the paper. Yet not for a second did I not want to stare into the essence of her being - her gorgeous brown eyes. Staring into another's eyes might be the most emotionally charged act in life. One is almost naturally too weak to accomplish the task. I wanted to sneak a peek. I could probably integrated it into a look-up-get-water move. So I will do it, all excuses accounted for. Just as I jerk my head up, I am pleasantly surprised ... I caught her off guard! I can only speculate what she was doing, but at that moment she madly and quite disorientately scrambles for the nearest book and resumes the "official" stance. Oh joy! That scramble far surpassed any comparable rewards from a peek...

//

The grab, the leap, the landing... the uncertainty of balance... the tug, the closeness... the shriek, the giggle... the danger of intersections, the passing between bus and herd... the warnings, "I'm getting on," "I'm getting off." Acts overlooked by the unobservant.

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Philip-Zhang Qiang

After the whole long semester's mild depression, half-conscious sleeps, waking up at 4 to ghostly look back onto my body laying flat in bed, crap teaching and so on, I had what I call "December Renaissance" here in boston in the next term. I can see that you are heading to that direction. the creative spirit is rising up, seeking release, seeking artistic expressions, seeking to translate the psychic wound to shimmering words and images. As the eye opens up again out of the dark to not just see, but itself being a newly discovered planet, a moon circulating a bright sun in the dark universe.
And all this happens in a blink...

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Yhinferno
On depression:

No man is a Man until he has died at least once.
No Man is a man until he dies.
For the slimmest margin separate the inside from the Outside. Looking Outward we always find ourselves previously unconscious and dead.

If you value the mind then you find yourself contained no where, contained by nothing. If you value your body then you find yourself contained wherever, contained by everything. To conquer the without or to conquer the within, that is the question. Conquer the outside at
the expense of submission of the inside; conquer the inside at the expense of submission to the outside.

But finally, I am an existentialist! Happiness hides in every nook and cranny; joy to those who seeketh Happiness in her den.

The horizon of possibilities, the world.

What Yoga culture has to say to Western philosophy and Science

This has been brewing inside me for sometime, now I'll try to sketch its outline here, briefly.

Starting my own experience. The first thing I did when back from my friend who’s seriously depressed, together with other bad news from New Haven, was sit down and meditate. I sank into a deep slumber deeper than normal sleep. Since then I stick to it. I didn't insist, but it's rather an inner need. As I read more about Indian body culture I came to be convinced that the obvious effect it bears on my mind, pacifying and clarifying for the least, is through cleansing of my nerve system.
Deep meditation is one of the eight limbs of yoga, which means connection, connecting the individual being with the universal, the atman, the being of the self, with the Brahman, the foundation of all beings. This Indian spiritual practice/body culture/philosophy (it is hard, almost impossible to bind it down with one of the terms) has much to say to the old fight between free will and bio-chemical power, or between mind and body. If we are to separate mind and body, at least we've got to admit that they are two end of one same band, the stretching of one end will stretch the other end by moving the whole band.
That's where Hindu culture comes into conversation with Heidegger, Meleau-Ponty, and Wordsworth. In a Wordsworthan moment, or a special kind of lyrical moment, when Wordswroth focuses all his attention on daffodils, or standing before a tomb for an hour, the mind-body is one, which are “yogaed,” connected, banded with the oneness of the world, the beings. Heidegger states two major modes of Dasein's existence: being-in-the-world and being-along-with-the-other. Neither of them takes into account of at least another major, though rarer, mode of Dasein's existence, namely the Wordsworthian, lyrical connection with the beings, or rather, the Being. This third mode can be theorized, if we have to theorize, as one of the manifestations of the human being's natural tendency to merge into the oneness of beings. This major mode of being has its vital foundation, which can be explained by Yoga culture and enhanced by practice of it. Of course, Hindu culture, especially the yoga culture would have a fruitful conservation with Meleau-Ponty, whom developed what Heidegger didn't mention much, the body in Dasein's being.
Now it is Hindu culture with its subtle ideas of Minody (my coinage) which will hold strongly against any reductionism. The many humanists' good-willed insistence on free will is more or less vain, before the strong explanatory power of science, ever getting stronger after Frued and Darwin. It is heoric but not quite effective to resist it by giving up the majority of territory and insisting on one small patch of ground. "Yes, it's all decided by the bio-chemical, but that I'm here to argue for free will is not by that, but by my own free will itself." The framework in which this argument is made is false, out-dated, partial. Look at the number of people practising Yoga today, and the rate of its booming, even though most people are just doing the Asana part (bodily postures) of yoga for health benefits, but even only Asana's effect on the nerve system is more than obvious. It makes you feel good because it is cleansing your nervous system. I believe science will have to examine and try to understand it. And after, the society will absorb it into its fiber and it will eventually change the way we think about our Minody, our being, our way of living. And with meditation, the shallow reductionism either to body or mind, or superficial devision, will be shed away like old skin. They are not even something to fight against, being so far away from the deep being of human.
I guess I'm a bit preachy in writing all this. I've started a reading project to explore Hindu culture, and have finished Gitanjali and Siddhartha, moving on to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, The Upanishads, Lotus Sutra. I am also planning a longish trip to India some time soon. I’ll say more when I have had more experience in both meditation, Asana and my trip of India.

My Daughter, Discourses and Human Nature

I am a father. I have been a father now for almost 16 months. The amount of joy and happiness my daughter Eliana has brought to my life is extremely hard to explain, because it is different than most other kind of joys I have felt before.
But my daughter has not only brought novel joy to my life - she has also become two eyes, from which I can look upon the world. I see the world anew in her. I see the world anew through her, because I am displaced by her. When she was born, a cry echoed throughout the room. A cry that I did not create, and an echo that I could not control. I was a bystander to the birth of my child. Not a creator, not a maker - a bystander. My daughter is of me, but not myself. This fact is still after all of these months incomprehensible for me. I and my wife made her, but I can take no credit for how she has developed. I have no idea how and why she grows, walks and lives.

The Serotonin Fall(s)

In Chinese literature, the sorrow of encountering the fall season is as banal as it is old. And as old and banal as it is, it still affects me, conditions my feeling of the fall; so, as the leaves fall, I accordingly suffered from what my roommate, a biologist, calls a seasonal depression. "Your serotonin level falls."

Hah, leaves and my serotonin levels are falling, as they kept falling in the history of Chinese literature. In the eye of a biologist, the repetitious literary laments of the fall season becomes literal: my laments of the season is caused by the fall of my serotonin; which, like the falling of leaves, is no more than a natural phenomenon.

Asobi Seksu

Last weekend I went to the city for the first time since starting grad school. An old high-school acting buddy was checking out an Asobi Seksu concert.

To my ignorant ear, it was NY art rock blown out into loud prog synthpop, with a Japanese-American lady making ecstatic convulsions behind a keyboard and warbling banal lyrics in English and Japanese at center stage. The tall, white bass player would often turn his back to us and run his hand up and down the long neck of his bass guitar. Multi-colored, spinning squiggles were projected on the wall.

Mushroom digressions--Too Busy to Seize the Day

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – "Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future. --Horace

On the contrary, any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting. --Heidegger


Seize the Day, is a novella by Saul Bellow that is on my reading list. I read from Wikipedia that it is supposed to be great, “a small grey masterpiece.” I plan to read it in the future when I am less busy, not so hectic.

“Sorry that…but I’ve been extremely busy.” “It has been such a hectic week!” “Life is so busy!” To say that one is being busy is not really an excuse, because we are actually, factically busy. Everyone has so many things to do that the busy-ness is undeniable. But what makes us essentially busy is probably more what to worry about than things to do. There are ten things that we really want to achieve, five items that we really desire and three things we really afraid that it will happen. The future sucks us in onward, out of the present.

Two slide guitar albums

One is "Jin Jin" (firefly) by slide guitarist Bob Brozman from Howaii and Sanshin player Takashi Hirayasu, from the southern islands of Japan. (Sanshin is the Japanese adoption of the Chinese instrument Sanxian) Folk songs from the south of island. As refreshing as breeze from these island. The Lyrics can be funny. For example, one of the songs tells children that there are three ghosts wondering in the street at night. They will cut your (now you are the children!)ears off if you don't sleep by 8 at night. etc. See
http://www.bobbrozman.com/jinjin.html

These are nice quotes

http://home.uchicago.edu/~pmarkell/extracts.html

Phenomenology of Loneliness

A few months ago my wife and our little daughter took off for two weeks, leaving me alone to myself in New Haven, CT. I have felt lonely before - it was not the first time. But this time it was especially lonely to me. I found myself wondering:

What is this "loneliness" I feel? How is it to be described? How to be named? I must wrestle with it to understand it even if I might not be able to conquer it.

But now you might say: who are you to think you might know anything about loneliness, son? And you are right to think that. I married very young and basically went from living with my parents, to living with my wife. I have never spent time alone before. However, for those who have never been married before or have never lived with a person before, I may ask: how do you know how it feels to be alone as a married man? A dog can naturally survive without living in water, but the fish will notice the dry air instantaneously and die. To understand how air "feels," must one not rather turn to the fish instead of the dog? And if this does not suffice, then let the doubter and inquirer simply take this post to be thoughts from a beginner.

It

The ‘Bringer of Light’ (henceforth denoted as the 'it') will not take "No" as a satisfactory answer; not even the subjugation of a people, bowing down at their feet is sufficient - to truly fulfill it's lust for conquest, one must become them; for it is not the physical subjugation that it deems glorious rather the mental. The redemption of a mind only fuels its lust for more; the adrenaline urges them forward.

Freedom reconsidered

Recently there are two books that really inspired me. One of Heidegger’s being and time, especially the section when he talks about “the They,” about how our being is shaped, caged, covered up by the Others. (Sartre, a profound misreader of Heidegger famously said: “Hell is the other” (L'enfer, c'est les autres), The others as the totality of the common and the ordinary of people. The other is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, especially the part in which he is talking about the power of political correctness to control and to eliminate certain kinds of ideas and opinions from being thought, making freedom in thinking and ways of life more or less an illusion. Let me quote one passage from each. I think the connection between is obvious. And I hope it would be thought-provoking to you, too.