A dark man – what could he want
But a never-ending embrace,
Dolphins in the water, a wood of birches
And a hill from which to watch the Aurora Borealis?
What could he want, this dark man,
But a boat floating on warm oceans without course,
The planes of a treasure island, and a house
That looks over the beach of lost days?
What could he want, this dark man
But a little world, three truths,
Some breadcrumbs for the birds,
And a glass of wine that reflects dreams and cities?
Author Archives: d.perry
Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You
by Yu Xiuhua (translated by Ming Di)
To spend or to be spent, what’s the difference if there is any?
Two bodies collide — the force, the flower opened by the force,
and the virtual Spring brought by the flower — nothing more than this,
and this we mistake as life restarting.
In half of China, things are happening: volcanoes
erupt, rivers run dry,
political prisoners and displaced workers are abandoned,
elk deer and red-crowned cranes get shot.
I cross the hail of bullets to sleep with you.
I press many nights into one morning to sleep with you.
I run across many of me and many of me run into one to sleep with you.
Of course I can be misguided by butterflies
and mistake praise as Spring,
and a village similar to Hengdian as home.
But all these are absolute
reasons that I spend a night with you.
Wang Huning recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
a medicine cuisine
star of the earth
a certain fatty substance
emitted from the earth
rot from the stars
spit of moon
river polishing a stone
youtube self help
spiritual pollution
every manner of bourgeois import
from erotica to existentialism
Is this a planet of life?
seek truths from fact
no new ghosts
time to territorialize death
these memories are shaped
by the needs of my present
And so I call to you,
my shadow catcher —
feast
“As far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.
So an abstract individual is someone who forgot, for some time, that they are part of a larger unit, and owe respect to all the other choosing individuals.”
…
“It is the only crime we have…To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices.
Your…institutions – talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.
We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.”
– China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Hartfield says this about good writing: “Writing is, in effect, the act of verifying the distance between us and the things surrounding us. What we need is not sensitivity but a measuring stick” (from What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, 1936).
I began fearfully scanning the world around me with a measuring stick in hand the year Kennedy was shot, which was fifteen years ago now—fifteen years spent jettisoning one thing after another. Like an airplane with engine trouble, I started by pitching out the cargo, then the seats, then, finally, the poor flight attendants, getting rid of everything while taking on nothing new at all.
Was this the right way? How the hell should I know! Sure, life is easier like this, but I get scared when I imagine what it will be like to be old and facing death. I mean, what will be left after they incinerate my corpse? Not even a shard of bone.
My late grandmother used to say, “People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can’t dream at all.”
The night she died, the first thing I did was reach out and gently close her eyes. And in that moment, all the dreams she’d seen in her seventy-nine years vanished without a sound (poof!), like a summer shower on hot pavement. Nothing left.
– Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
It is like sewing, the rhythm of stitching by hand, which also exists in country blues. When I last met Keiji Haino, we talked about Syd Barrett’s particular, cutting kind of guitar playing. If only the on-beat is used, the song kind of stands still, but with playing off, or behind or ahead of the beat, it can move forward, like sewing. This kind of discovery makes it possible to animate ordinary songs.
…
Error itself can not be a purpose. There is nothing better than not to error. We always try hard to play well, and it is legitimate. However sometimes an error may contain more information than music that is commercially distributed. That is not because of the matter of the error itself, rather it is because of the frame of word that is put on the music by forcing the listener to ask the question why the person had failed. That is why traditional music have no error no matter how it were gauche. The error is a modern outcome. The frame of word as information is an unavoidable matter since the occurrence of the tableau down to contemporary music. Error has two aspects. One is that economic and temporal leeway is necessary for acquiring craftsmanship skills, and that is impossible for multitude. Error is a matter of poverty, and its incentive is not to be attributed to individual laziness. We are alienated from a group of “professional musicians” who are dressed artistically indeed, and most of us except who are allowed to stay home as social withdrawal or who withdraw money from illegal dealings, will finish our whole life without being able to even learning how to play heavy metal shred. Therefore it could be said that errors by our side are revenge against society. It alone could not get empathy of fellows, though. So, another aspect of error is a purely musical strategy. Error is an unexpected event, and is a chain of terrorism and its restoration in music. Now, it could be said that a performance without any accident has no social meaning.
– Tori Kudo