今晚在tunnel看了一场小众音乐会,一支来自波兰北部格但斯克叫做immortal onion的乐队,风格混杂爵士、电子和金属等。乐队三个成员看上去像是十来岁的小朋友,发言时也稚气十足,后来临走前专门上去搭讪,才知道其实都是二十出头的样子。整场只坐了三桌人,其中一组还仿佛是在街头失去方向不得已进来的年轻游客。第四桌坐着一个短发女子,手中捧着一个用来收钱的罐子,上面写着:最少五欧。中间进来一个扎着一大头脏辫的男人,坐在短发女子那桌,看不出轮廓的身体在T恤里晃荡,他有着所有扎脏辫的人固有的肢体语言和神态,不屑一顾地,随着音乐摇摆与尖叫。我盯着他看了一会儿,觉得他让我想起了一些东西,一些过往,一些可能性。 鼓手小哥用不太流利的英文说:你们给我们钱,我们才能回到格但斯克。一观众问:不然呢,你们会留在维也纳吗。小哥说:不会吧,可是我们也许就要去洗盘子了。众人笑。 很多时候生活把我们跟特定的人放在一个场景里,让我们误以为,这一刻如此特别,命运让我们相遇在此。事实上,我们只是碰巧出现在同一个画框里罢了,脏辫小哥会摇摆着尖叫着继续旁若无人地生活,鼓手小哥会去下个城市接着讲洗盘子的笑话,而我,明天此时就会忘了他们的样子。 Today I watched a small concert at Tunnel. The band Immortal Onion comes from Gdansk, a northern city in Poland. Their music is a mixture of jazz, electronic, metal and other genres. The three band members looked like teenagers and talked very childishly during the concert. Before leaving, my curiosity drove me to go up and ask them how old they were. It turned out they were all in their early 20s. During the entire concert, only three tables were occupied by spectators, one group of which seemed to be young tourists lost on the street and didn't see any other option as to where to go. At the fourth table sat a woman with short hair, holding a box intended for collecting money. It's written on the box: minimum amount 5 euros. At some point a guy with dreadlocks came in and joined the short-haired woman at the table. His slim body was shaking in the not so wide T-shirt without displaying its silhouette. He had the same body language and facial expression as all the people who have dreadlocks. Nonchalant, he swung and screamed along with the music. I stared at him for a bit, having the feeling that he reminded me of something, some past, some possibilities.
We have to use the money you give us to go back to the north of Poland, the dummer said in not so fluent English. Someone from the audience said, otherwise you will stay here in Vienna? No, but maybe we will have to wash some dishes, he answered. A laughter burst out. Many times life puts us in a certain situation with certain people to make us falsely believe that this moment is so unique because destiny brought us here. As a matter of fact, we just coincidentally appeared in the same picture frame, that's all. The guy with dreadlocks will swing and scream and live his life without caring much about what others have to say. The drummer will tell the joke about washing dishes again in the next city on the tour. And me, I will forget them by this time tomorrow. - the end -
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What people repeatedly tell us, and what we generally find true, is that we tend to regret about things we didn't do instead of things we did do. So let's take a moment to think about what this really means - when we say we only regret about things that we didn't do and not about the things that we did do. We rarely do nothing at all. And how many times in life have we been faced with exactly one possible course of action? Then we would have taken that course of action since there were no other possibilities. When we say we didn't do something, we most likely don't mean that we were in an absolute state of inaction, but rather that we didn't do this one particular thing. Most likely, we didn't do A because we did B (A and B are things... obviously), or we didn't do A so that we could do B. In either case, we can not separate not doing A from doing B. If our premise remains that we only regret about things we didn't do and never about things we did do, then we regret that we didn't do A but in the meantime we don't regret that we did B. Since not doing A is the precondition of us being able to do B, we should not regret not doing A as well. Of course, in the usual context it's always a new thing versus an old thing: starting a startup versus staying at the old job, traveling the world versus staying at home, so on and so forth. But carrying forward what one has been doing does not necessarily yield less exciting results as taking on a new challenge. Not staying on is also a form of not doing something. But by not staying on we got to do something else. Just like by not doing a new thing we got to stay on.
So regret is inevitable and by all means justifiable, but no regret should always be the final attitude. About two weeks ago I went on a somewhat exotic trip with one of my best friends since middle school. Since 2000, that would be. We became friends after we were assigned to share a desk from the very beginning, the usual way of making friends in our youthful years, full of happy or unfortunate coincidences. I've always considered it to be one of the best things that has ever happened to me. There's really nothing better than having some intelligent, fun, loving and morally upright companions throughout one's learning and trying years. What made you who you are? Didn't your path adjust itself every time you decided to befriend A, not B?
We went to the same high school but were in different classes, thus hung out less. We went to universities in different cities, thus at most saw each other once a year. The last time we met was in 2013 in Salzburg, when I first moved to Vienna and she was living in Nice. The time before last was in 2011 in Florence, when I was shortly living in Florence and she was living in Nice. Some years ago she moved back to China. I'm not the greatest at staying in touch, but friends as such don't require any stay-in-touch formality, or so I should hope. I originally planned to fly to Cape Verde alone for two weeks just because it is allegedly warm there in November. I shared this plan with her in one of our brief exchanges of messages, and she said, are you inviting me to come along? I was reasonably excited. In the end, we concluded that Cape Verde was too far away from China and we should go to Jordan and Israel instead. I could never forget what Maugham famously said, “We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” Now that can be applied in a much broader sense than the one person that we are supposed to love more than others. And on that note, I picked up this bestselling book at the airport, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (actually I picked up Optimism over Despair at the airport and ordered this one on Amazon because I did not want to pay the premium for airport placement twice). It contains the question "what if everyone had only one soulmate in this world". I haven't read it yet but I think the answer can be summarized into "thank god that's not the case". Ok back to Maugham's wisdom and my title of this entry. If we are all constantly changing and we are not lucky enough to be around each other to witness those changes, is our knowledge of each other based solely on a past that's obsolete, thus rendering our knowledge obsolete? Are we allowed to claim to know someone if we only know them from a time that is not the present? When our memory starts to shatter and there is nothing new to fill that void in the shape of our helplessness in retaining what is bound to be gone. Why is it that our memories of the earlier years seem to be much more solid than those formed later? Why is it that we would, despite our lack of current knowledge of each other, despite our inability to even lead a meaningful conversation at times, still choose to put each other before others, who are perhaps much more relevant to our life in the present tense? Why is it that we sometimes attach such a disproportionate value to our past? Is it because we are afraid that we won't know who we are if we are without our past? I guess "I know someone" is after all a rather general term. No one would challenge me if I say I know my neighbor, with whom I only conversed once under a somewhat coerced circumstance. I guess my point is, things are never to be taken out of context to be evaluated. That you are invaluable to me must not be simply understood as an ephemeral statement that is almost based on an impulse, but rather be put into the context of a lifetime. Maybe that's why tears always come to my mind but stop before rushing out of my eyes when I listen to Jay Chou's earlier albums. Very rarely do I think of listening to them, really. That's the perpetual wrestling between the transitory present me and the me that is the sum of my whole life. Forgive me for putting random reading and random thoughts together like this.
Wissen beginnt in ihren Augen mit der Erkenntnis der Täuschungen durch die Wahrnehmungen unseres sogenannten gesunden Menschenverstandes; nicht nur in dem Sinn, daß unser Bild der physischen Realität nicht der "tatsächlichen Wirklichkeit" entspricht, sondern insbesondere in dem Sinn, daß die meisten Menschen halb wachen und halb träumen und nicht gewahr sind, daß das meiste dessen, was sie für wahr und selbstverständlich halten, Illusionen sind, die durch den suggestiven Einfluß des gesellschaftlichen Umfelds hervorgerufen werden, in dem sie leben. Wissen beginnt demnach mit der Zerstörung von Täuschungen, mit der "Enttäuschung". Wissen bedeutet, durch die Oberfläche zu den Wurzeln und damit zu den Ursachen vorzudringen, die Realität in ihrer Nacktheit zu "sehen". Wissen bedeutet nicht, im Besitz von Wahrheit zu sein, sondern durch die Oberfläche zu dringen und kritisch und tätig nach immer größerer Annäherung an die Wahrheit zu streben. In Person of Interest, Sameen Shaw was put through over 7000 simulations in which she was expected to turn on her friends before she finally escaped. Then she realized there was no way for her to distinguish reality from simulations anymore. Or maybe, the reality was just one version of the simulations, in a broader sense. Kazuo Ishiguro, the new Nobel Prize winner described his way to boost productivity, "in this way, I'd not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one". And who says we're not the dictator of our own realities. Die Wahrheit ist, daß es kein solches Ding wie "Liebe" gibt. "Liebe" ist eine Abstraktion; vielleicht eine Göttin oder ein fremdes Wesen, obwohl niemand je diese Göttin gesehen hat. In Wirklichkeit gibt es nur den Akt des Liebens. "The truth is, there is no such thing as love; there exists only the act of loving." Now doesn't that sound painfully familiar. Haven't we all learned something from life after all. Two years ago I saw this installation "More Sweetly Play the Dance" by William Kentridge at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam. I possibly have written about this idea (for the lack of a better word) of endless procession in life. A few weeks ago in Paris, my friend insisted on going to Fondation Louis Vuitton for this exhibition of African artists. There, unexpectedly, I saw another installation "Notes towards a Model Opera" by him, which brilliantly combines elements with reference to the cultural revolution with the Chinese version of the L'Internationale as the theme music. We sat there for a long time, contemplating on the past that we did not live and the future that we do not yet know. Back to the topic of understanding art - I am never sure that I understand what the artist intends to impart. That's also the beauty of art - you take what you need, you see what you want to see. Then I started reading this book Six Drawing Lessons by William Kentridge (Norton lectures). It could be about drawing but also could be about everything. Let me just share a few paragraphs.
From this, Plato tells us, comes the ethical imperative of the philosopher. The man who has seen the light and apprehended the understanding that follows from it has a duty to return to the cave, to unshackle those in darkness, and to bring them up from the cave into the light. If necessary, this must be done with force. The nexus of enlightenment, emancipation, and violence emerges. Our agenda has been set. Mozart wrote The Magic Flute in 1791, when an optimism and clear belief in Enlightenment were possible. Such an optimism is no longer available. It is not that every act of violence has had its public relations, its brochures, its paintings and murals of a better life. But rather, and more difficult to apprehend, is that every act of enlightenment, all the missions to save souls, all the best impulses, are so dogged by the weight of what follows them: their shadow, the violence that has accompanied enlightenment. Caught with the question of what place these elements of the spirit of the mind of ideals can have today, or whether - and this seems impossible to accept - that every impulse for good, for generosity, for emancipation, is flawed, an impotent structure floating above a world of realpolitik and violence, takeovers and mergers. The contradiction continues, of a continent being assessed from outside itself for what it is, as if the long view, in which the entire continent can fit onto a single page of a map, in which all its differences can be obliterated in a single thought, continues today. It is unclear what makes the continent. Genetics? History? Tradition? And whether talking of a continent makes any sense, except as the locus, the provocation, for the discussion of African-ness itself. Knowing that when we put up a sign or a label - this event happened in this place, this monument is erected to the memory of - we admit defeat. We hand the responsibility of memory to the sign, to the object. It becomes a canned memory, like canned laughter on a TV show, which laughs on our behalf, it remembers on our behalf, it does the work for us. We are let off the hook. I feel like my own words are inadequate at this point. Next time. Every time I read an autobiography (or just a biography, for that matter), in this case Little Wilson and Big God, part of me cannot stop wondering why I should spend my precious time strenuously going through the mundane details from another person's life, not only irrelevant to me but also bygone and obsolete to the author him- or herself. I don't know what we are looking for in this, if we are looking for something at all. The similarity that consoles us or the contrast that strikes us? What would you rather find out, that we are all the same or we are all so different from one another that we can hardly be considered the same kind of creature? The same thing I wonder about my own songs and words. How much do those who hear/see them really understand? And even if they do understand, do they understand it the way it is intended? It's just some very general wondering that presents itself once in a while.
In a song from the new album of Sun Kil Moon with radically expressed and lengthy lyrics, I heard these lines: Maybe you can't relate to this song Maybe you're a millennial and you don't know the references at all Maybe you'll hear it and say, "I prefer your older songs." Or maybe the world has changed and I'm not that songwriter anymore It did cross my mind, "I prefer your older songs". Maybe the world has changed and he is not that songwriter anymore. And so what. What do we live for. What is better for a songwriter, to be appreciated by millions because your songs are ceaselessly repeated like a broken record on the radio in the clubs in the shops that sell things you would rather yourself not be associated to but then so what, or by one person who truly hears what you mean and the vulnerability that you had to reveal in your songs because without that vulnerability you are no longer you. It's not a rhetoric question; I do not know what is better. I never know what is better. I don't think there is one option that is better than another option on all fronts, in all dimensions including those we do not yet know. Maybe that's why you need that autobiography. That's why you need to create some evidence of your existence. That's why you need the songs you wrote when you were 20 and also the songs you wrote when you were 50. Not to see which is better. Not to be judged how much you changed. But to be sure that you did live your life through all those years, when one day your memory starts to shatter. Sufjan Stevens is what I reckon as one of the true musicians. His music is the kind that instead of stands out, blends in, almost on a subconscious level. As if it is and always has been a part of life itself. The kind that when you listen to it, you wonder how can you ever live a life without music, how can we ever understand each other if we don't understand each other through music. I have a very moderate appreciation for him, as what I have for Mark Kozelek - I barely remember their names but I cry every time I listen carefully to what they have to sing, delicate and truthful and full of soul.
I saw that Sufjan is going to have a concert in Paris in July for his new album Planetarium with other collaborating musicians at Philharmonie de Paris. I checked the ticket immediately, and they were plentiful. Then I hesitated, is it worth taking two days off and flying out there for a small concert. Some days later I checked again and they were sold out. I almost regretted my heart out and hated myself for not making swift decisions. Then a day later when I checked again, there were some last tickets available. I stared at that webpage and hesitated again, do I really want to go to a concert alone, do I really want to pay 200 euros for the flight to Paris. Then again they became unavailable. This happened a few times. And I wonder why. Why do we long for things the most when they are not available and hesitate the second they are within our reach. Is it a general aversion to commitment? Or is it because we're unsure of how much we want it so it can only be expressed through wanting it when it's not there, the most and least form of it? Is it a fear of being disappointed with our expectation and head held so high? I don't know the answer. But when I look at the greyed button "acheter", I feel as if I swallowed all the regrets in the world. Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow Find me in streets searching for something Something somehow that I lost Find me in life aching for someone Someone as good So I spent my evening not reading my new book from Anthony Burgess Little Wilson and Big God. Life is too short for authors I can't enjoy and people I don't love. Gnight. Read the following passage on New York Times this morning:
“Knowledge isn’t in my head or in your head. It’s shared. Most of what you ‘know’ - most of what anyone knows - about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a long-forgotten textbook or in some export’s head. One consequence of the fact that knowledge is distributed this way is that being part of a community of knowledge can make people feel as if they understand things they don’t.” The thing about routine is that it gives you reassurance and security, the lack of which you might sense when you are on the road, elsewhere. Not to say that being elsewhere and lacking in security is bad - it kind of forces you to stay alert and attentive, constantly conscious of your surroundings. I was not ungrateful when I had my usual Monday breakfast - scrambled eggs with vollkorn bread and a cup of cappuccino - and skimmed through the headlines of Der Standard and New York Times in the lounge at the Vienna airport. Only the almost intrusive stare from two businessmen sitting in my immediate vicinity at the henna on my right hand reminded me of the travel I just left behind. Soon enough the henna will fade because it does not match the high heels I feel obliged to wear on most of the days. Everything that’s not meant to last forever never really gives us a hard time letting go; it’s those that started off with the promise of eternity that leave us wondering what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. It’s the natural state of things. Rousseau said, the truth will not be shown to us before we have learned the art of forgetting. I guess forgetting is not at all as bad as we are led to believe. Maybe forgetting is natural; the unnatural is the constant reminding so that we don’t forget. Just as I naturally forgot almost all the French I learned, which would have come in handy in my effortful communication with the Moroccan people I encountered (although sometimes they randomly speak German and Italian as well). Knowing more languages certainly has its perks - I understand many more people when they talk. But let’s not forget that lots of communication is not conducted through language. The world that can be expressed by language is not the entirety of the world. The truth that can be described by language is not the entirety of the truth. I felt quite at ease on my first night in Marrakech while sitting in the peaceful riad, sipping delicious mint tea and attempting a simple conversation with three good-tempered Berber men and one French woman. They hardly spoke English. I find it safe to maintain that the premise of communication is not language, but willingness. It's nothing grandiose that I have to make a song and dance about it (though I might literally do it), but like every time you go somewhere new, a part of you is reborn. You don't become more of you, but a richer version of you. We embarked on the desert trip with an American couple living in Bulgaria that magically also chose the same accommodations in Marrakech and Chefchaouen. We witnessed the splendour of Dadès Gorges and counted the countless stars on the dunes of the Sahara together. At dawn we mounted very early to the top of a dune to wait for the sunrise. The chilly morning wind enwrapping fine sand grains thrashed my face gently and engulfed the murmuring sound from the people sitting nearby. I tried to think about something but my brain went blank. Time seemed to have stopped. I sat in that moment without any urge to go backward or forward in time. The sunrise was not visible through the clouds, so we walked quietly back to the tents without making a fuss about it. I later saw a tiny sun exuding pale light hanging in the middle of the grey sky on the back of my camel. Camels are awesome, I thought. Our driver Aziz, an amicable Berber, said "InShaAllah" a hundred times a day and on the third day I finally grasped its meaning. If God wills. You can plan all you want but it will happen only if god wills. Neither he nor I am religious, but the point is not so much the God. It's the same old argument - who is in control of your life, yourself or something else. Is it fate, or is it arbitrary, or is it a well-planned combination of the two, if such a plan is at all possible? Or are your self-made decisions the sole explanation of where you are and what you are? What are we anyway? It's like trying to give a definitive definition to an undefinable thing because we are supposed to be ever evolving, not stagnating. Maybe we only need to start worrying when we are actually able to give ourselves an unambiguous definition - when we stop becoming and start being. Or maybe what we are and what we are becoming are fundamentally the same thing, if we look at it from a different angle, disregarding the time element. I drew a postcard with water color (my friend is an artistic type with adequate equipment at any given time) and sent it to a friend. It's the doors and walls in various shades of blue in Chefchaouen. I really didn't care that much if it would reach its destination or not, knowing for a fact that it was drawn and sent on its way, which I will also forget sooner or later. InShaAllah. So they would say. Yesterday I wanted to write one entry starting with "today I want to talking about death, because my grandma is dying". I got caught up in something else. Today I'm gonna have to start this entry with another sentence, similar yet in a way completely the opposite, "today I want to talk about death, because my grandma is dead". There are of course many euphemistic ways to express "dead", but that doesn't change the person's state of no longer living. I got a message from my cousin living in the States around 21:30, as I was watching some TV and having my dinner consisting of supermarket food which I bought after a long but not unproductive working day. She told me she passed away three hours ago. My parents didn't even bother to tell me. My grandma had been sick for years. She hadn't been eating or drinking for a week. We all knew it was time, but all weren't sure when exactly.
I read the message from my cousin with the calmness of reading any other message, about weather, about concerts, about travel plans, about baby pictures. For five minutes I had no reaction. Then I broke into tears and cried for a long long time, the first time in a long long time, in my hotel room with the window open but I didn't care if anyone would hear me or wonder what could possibly have happened to this woman that sounds so genuinely tragic. As I cried I imagined myself walking through that narrow gate into the residential compound where my grandma had always lived ever since I could remember. There have been many new buildings being built in that neighborhood, and the two buildings in my grandma's residential compound, grey and short and ancient, are still standing, almost grotesquely amongst the never-finishing construction sites that seem to be promising something too pretty to be true. Since I left home in 2006, I usually just went back once a year, and never stayed for a long period of time. Every time I would go and visit my grandma a few times, from the time when she was robust and stubborn and tenacious, to the point when she was dependent and weak and insensible. From the time when she could write lengthy letters and find the countries I had been to on the map hanging in her living room, to the point when she forgot my name and all she knew was that I was going to a place far far away and all she could do was quietly holding my hands till I left. Many things have changed since I was a child. I grew big and things grew small. Memories grew small. Things that once seemed so important and significant grew small. People I used to know so vividly grew small because of the growing distance. I am in this world and I don't know any more who is also in my world. My parents have moved. My middle school has painted its buildings into a weird pinkish color. My good friends are scattered around and it's always years between our two reunions. If I say there's no sadness in any of this, I must be lying. But I thought a predicted sadness would be at least perceived as a lighter sadness. As I was crying I realized I was not crying merely for the fact that my grandma is gone. That part has been predicted and accepted. I was crying about all those years when I was not there for people that needed me. And what I have achieved in exchange of all that. That childhood of mine, when no one remembers it any longer, will no longer be there. I talked with my cousin two days ago about whether to go back for the funeral. We agreed that it would be okay if we don't. It might be okay objectively but not okay subjectively. If you don't hold onto things, they will fly away without a trace. The guy I like said to me, I am really sorry to hear that. I thought, that hardly offers any consolation. Then I was at a loss of what to say to my mother, anything. I was never too talented with this kind of words. I've been listening to "I need my girl" from The National about a hundred times today, maybe because I might go to their concert in Berlin. The lyrics don't even make sense. On Death and Dying is the title of a book that I've always wanted to read. I've been rambling. I should sleep. I quite liked the story about the cleanest man in school. An entrepreneurial guy printed some T-shirts to sell on campus, and stopped after having recouped his investment, left with a massive stack of (the same) T-shirts laying under his bed. One day he was too lazy to do his laundry, so he just picked out one of the T-shirts to wear. That was pretty convenient, so instead of doing his laundry, he just took out one new T-shirt after another to wear every day. People that saw him all believed him to be the dirtiest man in school - he never changed his T-shirt after all!
But see, that's the problem. He is actually the cleanest man in school, because the T-shirt he wore every day was brand new. Then Ellenberg offered a more correct version of the famous Sherlock Holmes line: "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis that didn't occur to you to consider." In the case of the cleanest man, one should have a rather extraordinary imaginative capacity to cook up the hypothesis that would turn out to be true. However, in the daily interaction with other people, especially those about whom you have a limited knowledge, it is very likely that their truth would be a hypothesis unthinkable for you. Unthinkable and unheard of. How can you even begin to understand the other person if you have no means to form the proper hypothesis to start with? How am I to understand why you do what you do if it wouldn't even occur to me to do what you do at all? You see what I mean? "Probability measures the degree of rational belief to which a proposition is entitled in the light of given evidence." said Keynes somewhere. The thing is, nothing is absolutely objective. Observations might be objective, but evaluations are not. Just like when we hear random we tend to think about 3 or 7, not 0 or 5. I don't even know what bias means any more. If the default condition of all of us is biased, shouldn't it be referred to as unbiased instead? I'm confusing myself again. But it's true that we should be more careful when we use the word probability and not say things like "there is a 20% probability that God created us". Sometimes it's jus a yes no question, so pick a side. Pick a side and stick to it. Not that which side really matters as much as you think. |
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