Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy

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

Is this a planet of life?
Then why do people die?
This is not life, this is death.
Can’t you understand?

You’re only dreaming.
You’re not real here.
You’re only dreaming
      you did all the things
      you did before you died.

You’re asleep.
Wake up before it’s too late
    and you die in a dream.

This world is not the real world.
It’s all illusion. It’s not real.
Can’t you feel that this world is not real?
Someone cast a magic spell
      on the people of planet Earth.

If you do right they put you in jail.
If you do wrong they put you in jail.
You can’t win.
You got to do something else.
You got to get away from here.

You make death your master.
You’re not free.
If you’re free, why do you bow to death?
Is that what you mean by liberty?
Stop bowing down to your master called death.
If you’re free, prove it.

– Sun Ra

from Kuki’s Metaphysics of Literature:

“The past is not simply something that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already come into the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite future and, moreover, that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but the infinite present, the eternal now.”

Excerpts from The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman:

The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

Time was like a whirlpool.

Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.

Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.

…

According to the anthropologist Carmen Blacker, the word for divination in Japanese is ‘ura or uranai, a term which appears to indicate primarily “that which is behind, and hence invisible” (nayra)

…

But some imported ideas were rejected outright. In 1948, the Japanese, still recovering from the war and the lingering exhaustion that followed years of starvation and despair, held noisy protests against American-style Daylight Savings Time. The Occupation authorities were surprised: bringing the clocks forward an hour had seemed a minor innovation, when more drastic ones – granting suffrage to women, abolishing the hereditary rights of the nobility – drew fewer and less vehement complaints.

Daylight Savings Time became sanmah ta-imu (‘summer time’) in what the historian John Dower has termed ‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment. The Japanese felt summer time drew out the difficulty of their daily lives, and when the Occupation ended, it was one of the first things to be scrapped.

People wanted darkness to come earlier.

…

Since the late nineteenth century, Japan has used the Western calendar, but never the Christian system of counting years from the birth of Christ…The end of the Cold War gave its name to the reign of Emperor Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito: Heisei (‘Peace Everywhere’), because he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The 9/11 attacks happened in Heisei 13. Under the old system, the emperor’s astronomers might perhaps have restarted time by calling a new nengo after the so-called Bubble Economy collapsed in 1991, or after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But Heisei – Peace Everywhere has continued on, while North Korea launched missiles into the Sea of Japan and the United States fought al-Qaeda.

…

In 1921, a “Correct Time” propaganda was carried out in Japan under the sponsorship of the Education Department, and some eighty bell-ringers were rewarded for their long and faithful service. The recipients…included two women, one of whom was named Matsu Obata, aged 82. For fifty years she had struck the bell twenty- four times a day, and she had been admired for her accuracy in the execution of her duty, one requiring a great deal of watchfulness…

…

The monks wore enormous, tight-woven wicker barrels over their heads, hats that symbolize the death of the ego. When the Tokugawa fell, the emperor’s new government outlawed komusō, because they had often acted as spies for the Tokugawa. After 1868, komusō temples were burned, and much of the sect’s musical repertoire lost: notes that imitated the crying of cranes, or the beating of their wings; wind; petals falling; a bell. The Meiji authorities appropriated the beehive-shaped hat for convicts, who wore them into court. What had symbolized the ascetic’s ascension toward the sublime became stigmatized, an object of shame.

…

Kobayashi moved toward the eighteenth-century tomb of Tsunayoshi, the ‘Dog Shogun. Tsunayoshi became infamous for his edicts that penalized anyone who mistreated animals, especially dogs. ‘For the sake of a single bird or beast, the death penalty was inflicted. Even relatives were given capital punishment or deported and exiled…one contemporary account complained, after Tsunayoshi’s death, and his so- called ‘Laws of Compassion’ were rescinded.

…

Reducing a land to atoms,/ These atoms are measureless, untold./ Boundless lands, as many as these atoms/ are gathered on a single hair.

‘For Buddhists, the past, the future, and this moment: everything flows at the same pace, Takahashi said. ‘Every second is equal. The past and the future and what’s happening now, aren’t separate.

You can say a lot about time: but time is also things that don’t happen. I grew up in Hokkaido. On my route to school there was a crossroads and at the crossroads was a stop light. It was such a quiet place that my younger brother and I used to blast right through on our bikes without stopping. But one day, for some reason, I did stop. And a car whipped around the bend and zoomed through the crossing. If I hadn’t held back a few moments before, I would have died. Right in front of my younger brother.

Afterward I thought everything had happened in slow motion. For my brother, the moment went by like a flash. But time has the same flow: everywhere and always. How we think of it must just be a function of our brains. That sense is just the way we process our fear of death.

Because no one comes back to tell us what happens after we stop breathing, we’re scared of death. Time is the frame- work, the scaffolding, for how we experience that terror. Time lets us look away from fear. You might think of time as the life we have left.’

‘And the dead?’ I asked. ‘What about the dead?’

Takahashi shrugged. ‘The dead have slipped out of the framework.’

Excerpts from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (which I cannot recommend enough):

Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves- each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.

Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.

…

That week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.

Nabk 

Somewhere by the tree at the extremity of thought,
it’s November and I’m still hunting shadows.
You told me that most natural
action tends to follow an arched trajectory.
You told me about
the dots that stretch and squeal.
You told me to be always
at the ready to embrace the mystery.
And now, I’m helping employers with their needs.
I’m exploring the financial viability of empathy.
Everyday I’m learning extinction.
Everyday I pray to awaken
as a holy knight of the commercial city.
I see mirrored vistas and voluptuous   sniper rifles,
desert sands and metals sifting through flesh.
Plastics oozing into blood oozing into cum
slides down the dried out river beds
like phlegm in my throat.

It’s December and I’m still hunting shadows,
probably will be every month of the rest of my life.
I am a monocrop. I am a dry soil. I am a “roadkill”
or as a man once said to me, “fog’s morning bounty”.

My heart is becoming slick, like the sweat which still stalks my skin.
And the sweat, over years, like a river.
And the river, over years, like my veins.
Through this broken circle I
shape the body round the vowels of
mixtal choruses one over from blowing corpses.
We should all pursue becoming slime.
Where lie I? Behind your ridges was always why.
Your language-scape, I traverse like a sunny day.
ooooooooo\\\\\
and all dat

Your skinshape and the hope between two you’s.
The sucking and the squelching,
the mewing and the leching,
and the light that cuts through all things.

I love the way the hours caress you.
Like silt in the river bend, you leave small threads 
                                                    of yourself 
                                         cross the land.
Like turtle tracks, I stalked the path.
Like grass, the fur of the rabbit.
Like home, the rock ledges down to the river
                     sang like wooden stove. 

The water draining down the streets is always grey.
The Cathars were a 12th to 14th century Gnostic Christian movement
who regarded all water as unclean, as they said it had been corrupted by the earth. 
My knees crumble like dirt. My hands like that clay I was born on –
just under the berm, you had to dig to reach material or form.
I built mounds like  I build    my accretion of data
             flights like      I fly        around this dark earth looking for you.

I want to wrap you in a cocoon of my information
like your head between my thighs 
while you tower over me in dusk light.
I need you like the clouds need the sky – 
backdrop my affections, silhouette my afflictions.
Like I watched you pirouette in 9am snow.
Like I watched your tears through a zoom window. 
How you inched away from violence 
while I was moving in miles.
How you drew away like I drew a sword. 
Where the blade pierced, my skin was left sore. 
How do I know information wants to be free?

I always worry I am losing the ability to correctly distinguish.
You watched me gradually populate the rare failure region.
My wishful thinking. My exaggeration. My reversal. My escape. My distortion.
You were preventing complications, minimizing impairments, and maximizing function.
I was trying to cut out the empty space between reiterations.
You were honing your latent commercial energy.
I was trying to learn to trust my instincts.
I’m trying to explain something to you here in this rendering of glyphs.
If my phrasing is somewhat bent, it is only to try 
to form a mold of a space that can’t be contained:

1). The logic with conjunction and disjunction (spiral and anti-spiral)
2). (dark I) and ‘u’ combination and its long form yield what shapes?

“You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt, species die, and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”

– from Blindsight by Peter Watts