Opium and the Law

My vampiric existence continued last night, though I forced myself to wake up early this morning in the hope that I can start adjusting my sleeping pattern. I forged ahead with my composition. I wasn't terribly inspired, though the passages I wrote sounded 'right.'

I finished reading Opium and the People (Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards). The project is essentially Foucaultian, though the writers never quoted him, because in a way, as social historians (at least as far as this project is concerned), Berridge and Edwards try to resist accepting any figurative model. For them, their book suggests a way to investigate the issue of opiate use and public policies with the epistemological space of Foucault in mind (again, suggested, but not named), but the reader's consciousness of the actual physical and material conditions of the biopolitical structure in British drug politics and policy-making (and in relation to it, the formative elements of the British polity at large upon the basis of the biological lives of the 'people') in today's society (in terms of the book, post-1968 society) is one that cannot be easily negotiated simply through an ontological question.

Policy-making in the twentieth century (and arguably, since antiquity) presupposes an ontological turn that transforms animal lives into humans, and vice versa, and the underlying presupposition of public policy is in fact the management and execution of human lives as animals. As long as the book stays within the concern of policy-making as a symptom of this ontological question at large, the reader is left with two choices: either one must abandon tentatively, for 'pragmatic' reasons, the ontological impasse that the Foucaultian thesis has propounded (and later on, developed by Agamben), and continue to make policies based on the assumption that our democracy is founded upon the execution, exclusion, and management of animal lives in the name of the law, or one must seriously rethink the question how a new way to approach the negotiations of drugs, and our epistemological space that gives forms to their beings (and hence, our understanding of them, their effects, the social, political and monetary values), that would forever suspend the violence of the law and the community that sustain themselves upon the exclusion of lives without any percepts of beginning or an end.

Eclipse

For a cat, the joy of life can be derived from such subtle things as a touch of the human finger on the fine hair of her scalp, the gentle rubbing of her paws, or simply falling asleep while looking into the depth of the human eyes--the kind of intimacy a child shares with her mother, an absolutely pre-linguistic and unconditional jouissance. Unlike me, my cats never worry about my being on Californian schedule all month, something that has been making me rather uncomfortable these days: going to bed at 4 am, waking up at 10 or 11 am. In truth, the schedule doesn't bother me as long as I don't find excuses not to go to the gym or finish a certain task because it has passed a certain hour; but having said that, I do miss the morning. There is something 'hopeful' about the angle of the sun and the scent of the air, about smelling the first cup of coffee at an appropriate hour, or perhaps even being at the gym without worrying that the sun is going to set by the time I get out of there. Alas, perhaps I am temporally conservative.

In fact, today, things have been feeling like an eclipse. Since I always fell asleep around 10 pm on my couch (and then ended up reading until 4 am after I woke up), I decided to put my blanket next to me and read on my couch at 1 am, in the hope that I would somehow drift off of my own accord. No, life doesn't work that way. My eyes adjusted themselves to the dim reading light and I felt absolutely awake around 4 am. I surrendered to my physiological impossibility (whatever it means), and again, I woke up around noon. I got a peculiar email from Olga (I hope that she wasn't offended by my asking her about the new translation of Shklovsky, or my being too boring), made my music, and didn't bother to use the gym afterwards. Alex came over for dinner, and I made my English curry to entertain him with half a bar of butter (not recommended for myself, or anyone above the age of 30).

The only productive thing today was my music. Yes, Dance, Dance, Dance is finally working as an ad lib. piece for a solo zhongruan and a chamber orchestra (ad lib. aurally, but mathematically calculated). Please let me finish this piece.

Let me see if I could manage ending my vampiric life today.

La Fée verte

I have rather translucent curtains on my windows, so does my neighbour across the street. Judging from the way he is dressed, he has an office job somewhere during the day, and he stays up until pretty late at night. He has a piano room, and a mosaic lampshade. I never thought twice about him until I saw him peeking through his window, with his face mostly covered by his curtain. Perhaps he finds what I do in my apartment objectionable, or perhaps he eagerly waits for me to masturbate in my apartment with utmost excitement. Either way is fine. We all need amusements in our humdrum lives.

Imagining stories behind our neighbours' windows from the titbits of actions passing in front of our eyes is the foundation of urban modernity, of photography, and of cinema. However, in order to truly appreciate the beauty of such fleeting instants captured in the image consciousness, one ought to be able to afford to be free from any human praxis, and the fetishising effort of our social attachment of ethical and monetary values to any human production, or for him, the lack of it. His job is to be frozen in time, in an ex-stasis that defies chronometric time, and it is in the disclosure of such 'temporality-outside' that he can arrest an escaping instant as a consciousness, savour it, live in it, and partake of its 'caring of'' the world he shares, but stands outside this world of excitement. The flâneur is, in this way, not an aesthetician; for what captures his interest is not the form of artistic production, but the rhythm of life beyond the chronometric sense of time--the death of life that defies the definition of an instant.

It occurred to me today that my creative impasse with Dance, Dance, Dance is not formal, it is one of poesis. When I thought of a rewrite, I was thinking about an 'improvement' based on the structural framework of what I wrote in 1993; but no matter how hard I try, I cannot create a 'better' piece than what I wrote in 1993, unless I leave that piece untouched. I worked on the third section first, and then broke up the three sections into three movements. I then took away those contrapuntally chaotic moments that really bothered me in the first section. After an hour of work, I gave up. In reality, the only section I feel passionate about is the first section, and that section drives me to ecstasy because it is the soundscape that I admire so much in the music of Takemitsu or Salonen, something that has always been in my head since the first measure I wrote fifteen years ago, but have constantly violated by regulating it with all the rules and rudiments I learned from my academic training. I need to give up the metric system that I have observed so diligently in the first draft, and carry on the soundscape that has the violation and suspension of time as its very foundation.

I have started working on the opium section of the dissertation, and am quite absorbed by all the stories about child doping, opium suicide and all the wonderful elixir of life that late Victorians had enjoyed but denied us by paving the way of modern drug control--a little break from football.

As for now, a little drop of absinthe wouldn't hurt; but a writer dreaming about absinthe at 2 am, instead of flirting with la fée verte herself, i.e. my poor little soul, is, in my opinion, by definition, ontologically contemptible.

Harvey

June is almost over, and I worked like a horse this month, didn't I? Starting from 1 July, I will have a whole year off just to write. The idea that I would have nothing more than a few hours of commitment per week in the city for the rest of the year so that I can concentrate on writing is quite a novelty, especially after labouring myself for eight years in this alienating city. I still remember that years ago, I vomitted in the 2nd Ave F train station as I couldn't stop coughing on my way to tutor my students at Park Slope, and the hour-long ride on the J train to give cello lessons to a pregnant Korean lady. She never rode the train herself, and she didn't realise how frightening that journey was. Ah, how can I not remember that 70 y.o. Korean woman in Chinatown who was so eager to learn the piano, that she would compare my lessons to her mother's milk. I admire her. I really do. She would finish playing the entire book in one week. She stopped her lessons after a month or so, claiming that her heart condition wouldn't allow her to be stressed out by the practice anymore. A strange feeling told me that she probably knew that she was dying, and she wanted to learn how to play before her time came--her childhood dream.

I stayed home all day today. I didn't bother to watch the Euro 2008 final. My original plan was to invite Alex to come to watch the game, but we played phone tags all morning. After having teased by two Spanish fans about my allegiance to the Azzurri in Nevada Smiths on the day of Italy's defeat, I didn't have much appetite to watch the German boys getting humped. I'm sure I can easily fall in love with Spain some day when I have a chance to visit there; but for now, I really can't care less.

TCM showed some of my favourite films today: All About Eve, Notorious, and Harvey. I was moved to tears by the scene in the alley behind Charlie's, in which Elwood talks about how people from all walks of life bring their troubles to him and Harvey:

Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. Uh--we've entered as strangers--soon we have friends. And they come over and they--they sit with us, and they drink with us, and they talk to us. And they tell about the big terrible things they've done--and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes and their regrets, their loves and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then--I introduce them to Harvey. And he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And--and when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back, but--that's--that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us. That's too bad. Isn't it? (Mary Chase, http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=harvey)

What beauty; what monstrosity!

The fugal section of the Dance, Dance, Dance keeps expanding, and I can't seem to find a way to end it. The piece still lacks details and some sections feel flat. Talked to Bob for quite a stretch of time about the old soirées, and how much we miss those neighbourhood bars in which life is not just a matter of sharing seeds.

I'm hoping to sleep at a decent hour tonight. I feel rather tired and am eager to start my week afresh.

Dance, Dance, Dance

A mosquito kept me up last night, and I didn't doze off until 7:30 in the morning. When I became conscious again, it was already two.

It was a rainy day, and I felt completely lethargic. The work on my music Dance, Dance, Dance went well. I wrote the piece in my Freshman year at Eastman. I was trying to come to terms with the idea that what I dreamt about the ideal separation between love and sex when I was a teenager would actually take a lot of pain to realise. On my birthday this year, I briefly recounted my story with Joe to John. John called it my 'kittie love.'

I penned Dance, Dance, Dance that year in my deep depression. I was in my 'existential' state. 'To see through the meaninglessness of life in order to live through it,' I told my therapist of the time, who only saw me once after I had destroyed the school's double-bass as a substitute for murdering and making love to a man (now I understand why I love Hitchcock). Now, I've finally read up my Nietzsche and Sartre to begin to understand the ontological problem behind these blanket statements, and how much we used to abuse them as justification of our self-indulged depressions; but who am I to look askance at the solitude and sadness of youth, a consciousness that we have all corporeally apprehended? Do I not envy that leap from being into nothingness that in my younger days I was so close to with my chest and skin? How can I not remember how I looked into the other side of the wall, the very instance at which I determined to rescue myself from a complete denial of human reason?

After all these years, Sartre never fails me, though Murakami Haruki does. I named my piece after his novel (which he named after a song by Chic), and I remember the delusional 'low' I would get myself into when I read that work over and over again in my cubicle-like dormatory. I think that I re-read the book a few years ago and couldn't care much about it. The chauvanism turned me off, and by now, there are more interesting narratives of people sorting things out--real, concrete, physical, existential impasse (Murakami Ryu, I would say, have more suffering to share than Haruki does in his early works), or, perhaps I myself have come to terms with the dolorous fact that nothing can be sorted out in this little interlude called life.

Dance, Dance, Dance (I will probably give it a new title), is about chaos. The rewrite is challenging because you can't take the chaos out of it and retain its spirit, though the reason for rewriting it is to fix structural issues, an act that is supposed to 'contain' the chaos that gives the piece life; but structure is essentailly roared out of the chaotic clashes of the cacophony of energies, the jumping, hopping, lawlessness which we call our world.

I don't know how the rewritten piece would eventually sound like as an entirety. The work has been going pretty decently. I'm now in the third section. There are still many things to be reworked and perfected. It is so easy to call myself lazy and 'untalented' (and I think I am), and it is so painful to labour your work without knowing and trusting yourself that whatever imperfection of blemishes would be fixed and healed. Maybe they won't be, and the worst imperfection are the many possibilities and many ideas that bubbled up in my mind or passed through my fingers as I ran them through the keyboard. I always wonder where those ideas would go, and how I can preserve them, for how many times would I regret the sacrifice of those fascinating sounds and voices in order to maintain the integrity of my piece.

I hope that my mom would feel better tomorrow with her cold; meanwhile, the mosquito has returned.

PS: Reading my post yesterday reminds me of Zhu Ziqing's essay 'Bei ying' (〈背影〉 The Shadow of My Father's Back).

On Trepidation

'"Fright" is your son's weakness,' said my old headmaster Jackland to my father, according to my father's account for their tea-hour meeting that evening. 'An education in the old country would do him good.'

It was before I left Hong Kong for England when I was a teenager. Jackland knew me resonably well before I left DBS, because every Monday, I would need to bring him receipts I collected from the Chinese Music Society into that gargantuan colonial office for his signature. My school was one of the first Anglican schools that took their roots in the new colony in the 19th century, and it was built like a set of a David Lean film (I mean one of those 'Indian-Arabic' ones). During the occupation, the Japanese used the school as the governor's house (a certain corner of the football field was known to have a tree for hanging, and broken pieces of urns from the time when the Japanese military used the field as burial ground). The office was sparsely furnished with desks, armchairs and bookshelves made with solid wood, and in sizes of a time when the world population was still not a major concern in people's minds. While Jackland, like most of the school administrators at that time in Hong Kong, believed that subtropical heat built character, his room was always amply cool. Behind his desk, there stood a stand with five to six whips, each bearing the history of an old headmaster taming the hot-blooded temper of a boy, embodying the very violence that disciplines animal lives into proper citizenry.

Like a well-trained cat, I do fear authority. Very often, authority makes me shrink into the core of my being; but sometimes, it inspires me to raise my fist, slam someone's doors, or imagines myself spilling blood onto a church alter (not so much against the divine authority it represents, but against the political authority it instantiates). Of course, the same boy who had an issue with fright in Jackland's imperial office would tell two Oxford professors to fuck themselves two years later in the old country. That would be another story to recount. Authority always inspires fear, and fear eventually inspires violence. This is not even interesting to discuss.

What interests me is the fact that two days ago, my father inadvertantly 'quoted' Jackland's remark on the phone as we were discussing how I dealt with my own problems in teaching. He was in a very paternal mood that evening. Perhaps the prospect that I might seek work in Hong Kong induced his disciplinary aspirations. I know, and I wouldn't know; but a little Möbius strip was quite tightly knitted in this remark. My father obviouly wanted me to conquer my fear in order to act more 'manly' (he and Carlyle could have a good talk, while I could chat with Carlyle's wife over a dose of laudanum); but any good Freudian like myself could tell that what inspired such fear was my father himself (as a figura that transcends time, so to speak). The very speech that was supposed to build up my 'manliness' ironically performed the act of implanting the very fear that it aimed to conquer. This doesn't sound terribly holistic to me.

Nonetheless, the good Freudian in me also tells me that my father's accidental borrowing of Jackland's remark was absolutely (yes, and pathetically) prarapractic. In a way, an 'accidental' borrowing is a tiny memory slip, a way by which something one has always deliberately repressed returns to haunt her/him. 'No, my son wouldn't be a coward,' says my father's consciousness, fighting bravely against his dreamwork. What parapractical about it is that this 'slipped' memory simultaneously hides and reveals the very fear he has within himself, that he has been haunted by my grandfather (a frightful geezer who was personally trained by Cheng Kai-shek at Whampoa). Indeed, the remark negotiates a much deeper perturbation about the manliness that he has yet achieved, and the anxiety that his love is yet to be fulfiled.

To be honest, nonetheless, my father is quite a laissez-faire guy.

O Captain! my Captain!