1.
Why don’t you shut up and be humble? The sense of intellectual superiority won’t lead you anywhere elaborate but the deadly ignorance of a real vulnerable human’s resort. Whatever the form you take to delineate it I only see the pretext of elite education that keeps justifying its exclusiveness. I’m tired when people are dying and yet you only want your fleeting glimpse of purified academic records in somewhat linguistic defence, but who the fuck are you racing with? As if things were genuinely getting better within this whole void. I now see that, except for resisting for living, any kind of resistance is well chosen , cuz it is so true that facts are theory-laden and theories are value-laden. So in this part of hypocritical reflection, whether you refer to the agora or the theatre the spectatorship has already reduced every sympathy to aesthetics. Rather we demand to see what you’ve been doing. Taking people there, positing them, and despising them, you think it just alright. Then go elevate yourself. I’m so done with it. 2. A Chinese novel called Loach, named after the bottom-feeding fish. A story of three who moved to the city to make money. ‘The city ends up crushing their futures: one is forced into prostitution and executed, another is accidentally castrated.’ ‘How casually they've been used and discarded: "vagrants," "the floating population," "low-end population," "i slaves" - the list goes on.’ Early in the book, they look up at a writer's window in a high-rise apartment. “What should we do to make him see us?" one of them asks. "Wave at him." "He can't see." "Shout at him?" "He can't hear." "Then, there is only one way." "What?' "Burn ourselves so that we shine like lamps." And in the critique by Megan’s Walsh, it’s said that Chinese workers now no longer need middle-class writers in high-rise apartments to tell their story for them — they are writing it themselves. A bitter sense of sarcasm rises in my mind. But I can’t help hoping. Maybe. Some of them did and a smaller part of them is still doing. Most of the time, people wait until death cleans the slate. The fickle snowflakes and the boiling flood accidentally force a word of a dignified life. ‘I do not want to be run over.’ An injured bird lying on the porch step, so clean, so small. Lifeless life enchants in a different language, true poets living on the most difficult page: ‘What’s that you’re mumbling, sceptical, something like this is all lifted from Nabokov. He was the barin’s son, you and I are the leftovers, come on, smile, there are tears on your face.’ 3. Every time I try and disclose my deepest and most shameful vulnerability to anyone I think trustworthy I don’t feel fully validated. I realise the expectations for love about one’s sorrow and rage are already problematic, but what if I don’t do it for my own sake, or what if all I ever wanted was respect with empathy / empathy with respect. As both are essential and either loss will drives to that sort of huge but subtle harms that I’ve experienced thousand times. And I feel destroyed every single time, even though I’m fireproof I withstood all. I walked through the aftermath and thereby I again chose to hold back like I could never be vulnerable and my resilience would cover beyond such fateful sentiments. The only problem is that neither can I give in to the disgrace and fit in whatsoever shitty system with a survivalist mindset, nor can I crash the hell and devote to the pain with faithful gratitude and acceptance. I don’t pity myself — so that’s never the problem, and I even have pinpointed the crux from my introspection: the one thing unsettled in me is that great self respect with self assured emotionality. Till the self-awareness of the stomach becomes prior to all, with its swelling pains. ‘I know my worth. The world disavows it.’ I am blessed with this thought. That’s why I’m still standing against the wall in an overprotective, awkward manner, which hurts me all the time. But I don’t believe this is the only thing I can have from you. ‘After I go, there will be so many years.’ I remember you once cried when I said so. You did cry. 4. ‘Destructively conservative, the totalitarians go much further than a simple scorn or censorship of the expressions of the resonant body: they obstinately seek to disqualify and humiliate them, to the point where the force of creation, of which such expressions are the product, is so marked by the trauma of this vital terrorism that it finally blocks itself off, and is thereby reduced to silence’ wrote Suely Rolnik. The resonant body remembers a kind of sketchy feelings to me. Sometimes they do it politely, gently. So civilised and benign that I feel bad about myself if I break down. But the forlorn, why the forlorn. A revolution starts from this: ‘We are humans, aren’t we?’ I can’t afford you, dear therapists. We are paying people to care about us. Intimacy fails. Humans’ perfunctory courtesy to each other deserves the most excruciating, piercing cry. ‘We narrowly missed it.’ August 2023