What kind of life do I want? This question vibrates like an arrow in the course of an irreversible and asymmetrical address in the mist.
It conjures an endless list of spectral incantation. Would I be mediocre? Would I be conservative? Would I be stupid? Would I be withering? Would I be resentful again for every step I’ve taken in no one’s name? Not a single box can be readily ticked here, now that I am called back to join this game.
A quick answer followed by so many names: First thing first, find a real job (join in and fake this reality). And then, give some commentaries on the present life. Only talk of the past when talking through your resume. Only talk of the future when hope is prospective and promises sell well to your audience. Now you crack the code: a productive manner under boredom and the system of profit-driven (or survivalist) rules, a sententious remark out of smartness rather than conscience, a relationship calculated by interests and turnover rates, a sequence of love open to nothing but reason… Then all that is thought to suffice life purely gives direct answers but does not create knowledge of how to live. (This, to me, makes life even more difficult. )
‘But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself to live ("I would like to learn to live finally"), is that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic itself forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns.Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live-alone, from oneself, by oneself Life does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever do anything else but learn to live, alone, from oneself, by oneself? This is, therefore, a strange commitment, both impossible and necessary, for a living being supposed to be alive: "I would like to learn to live."...If it-learning to live-remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the "two's" one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost.So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such. The time of the "learning to live, a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts... And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.’-- Derrida
Or would I be one of them, those ghosts, those who are not there, those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living? Would I be furtive and untimely? Would I be the apparition of the spectre that does not belong to time, or at least to what we call time.
Multiple past stories and future narratives befall me. I am not confused. I am just so lost, lost on the right track though, “beyond the living present in general and beyond its simple negative reversal”. I can only learn at the spectral moment, questioning in this instant, not receding to the simplistic comfort of the alleged present real life.
I shall not lose my sensitivity to those instants that are not docile to time and remind how it is to be free. I shall be back with true Testimony.
1 Sept, 2024
Hong Kong