| by: | Linda |
| to: | M |
| date: | 28 February 2009, 8:59 AM |
| preliminary remark: | 10-page explanation to ‘complete’ the ideas left behind in an one-hour verbal conversation. |
— I disagree on that epistolary intercourse being unreal, as opposed to the widely held belief that direct speech is real. Insofar as my experience is concerned, writing in the absence of others means self-revelation to the excess, whereas talking in the presence of others often requires disguising oneself in a social framework. I believe by the slow process of writing I am more apt at representing my true intention, and far more accurately than physical utterance could permit me. The presence of one’s self as can be observed in the intellectual exchange of correspondences, the communication between two souls who reveal their true nature to each other, is more tangible than the physical proximity that two speakers, hiding from one another, can share.
My ideal of friendship is that between Tchaikovsky and von Meck, a relation that is maintained by the art of pen alone.
— I disagree on that philosophical investigation is too abstract to be practical (my mind operates on abstraction anyways), for to me philosophy is not mere speculation as many others, misunderstanding it, think. It is a passionate mode of living, a concrete way of life that must be fulfilled in actions, in my average everydayness. I have thus far devised a difficult — though simple enough it seems to me — vision of man and the cosmos in the light of which an individual’s whole life must be lived.
— No doubt the life of independence and self-reliance I have hitherto conceived is a life better and purer than it can be lived. Yet difficult though my lifestyle definitely is, in the modern material world, everything has become too easy that perhaps one day people would like to have the challenge back.
— I demonstrate persistence in my long solitary walk according to the best light I can find, but am at the same time aware that my light may be projected into darkness. If this be unfortunately the case, I can only hope that the North Star is not veiled by dark clouds when I am lost in the dangerous forest.
— My natural proclivity, a target of a great many criticism, leaves me unfailing in being a person of principle. Any change in my mode of living requires a change in my principles, (Is this not the object of education? The formation of character.) one of which is relevant here: not to presume a social framework in any of my personal encounters.
— I suppose no sensible man will quarrel with me if I venture to say that he who is of a proud and dignified temperament would find it unacceptable, ridiculous even, to sink into full enjoyment of someone’s masterly dialectic without a sound basis for every argument.
— For one who has held her own integrity and moral autonomy at the center of her life, there is no insult more outrageous, or on the whole more unjustifiable, than to forbid her living according to her moral code.
— My past does not make up who I am, but rather who I am not, in that I am more than the sum of my past (notice the emphasis on the present tense). I am forever changing, the present and the future also belong to me. The future towards which my own being is projected must be given a higher priority, for it is the region wherein my being is defined.
— I agree with almost all existentialist thinkers on that possibility is higher than, and prior to, actuality. Contrary to the Aristotelian view which states that possibility belongs to actual entities because of their inherent actual structure arranging in a necessary way so as to make certain events to occur (e.g. my coffee cup can be easily broken because of its actual molecular structure), the existentialist’s picture of human being is a creature of possibilities whose existence cannot be accounted by, nor understood from, actual objects. As Heidegger said, ‘Man’s existence spread out temporally and spatially into distant regions beyond himself. Man transcends himself; more accurately, he is a transcendence’.
— How pathetic must it be for a man to have only a past laden with history, no present, no future? He is about dying. (I have always thought that this may be the reason why old people keep tracking back to the memories of their ancient times — they who have not much future at hand.)
— One who does not change is either dead or a God.
— I seldom think about my past or worry about my future.
— To those who tend to analyse my personal eccentricity within a particular cultural context which they judge primarily from my physical trait or name I always tell: ‘I am no more Chinese than you are’. Chineseness accounts for as much in my life philosophy as Polishness or Hungarianness accounts for in yours. My cultural identity being fragmentary, it would be more useful to espy a good deal further into my Germaness, but as relates to my mode of thinking alone, rather than to my style of living, dressing, or eating.
— Not that I encourage everyone to make a conscious effort at erasing memories, whether good or bad, from their mind. Only that I advocate passive forgetting over active remembering. To always cast a critical judgment upon the past events. To always look ahead. To let things be as they are.
— I can think of 3 explanations to account for the mindset of those who should itch to observe in my utterance a grandiose unfolding of the past towards the present: 1) by pure intellectual curiosity, nothing else; 2) by a malice desire to transform my personality after knowing how a particular mode of thinking came to me (more applicable to a psychological oriented mind); 3) by a habit to imitate another’s mode of living (more applicable to one who has not a strong sense of self). Amongst them #2 & #3 must not be encouraged, only #1 constitutes the necessary justification for their occasional inquiry. Even so, lacking self-interest in my own past, I much prefer to discuss the doctrines I espouse, values I hold dear, rather than relating stories that do not have any significance in human history.
— I have always felt guilty, though mild enough, when studying with great care and I hope proper diffidence an artist’s personal life. Is it moral for us to expose his/her private life under public scrutiny by publishing his/her personal diaries, making his/her epistolary intercourse a part of his/her posthumous legacy? Or perhaps there can be no moral issue regarding a dead figure?
Besides, I never believe that memories register truth, for the human brain does not objectively reflect outer reality. If the veracity of human behaviour be evaluated at all, it can only be evaluated in relation to a historical context, a particular frame of reference. Memory amounts to no more and no less than a distorted subjective truth in which some pain may be softened, some harm deepened, some joy straightened. No sensible man should take a writer’s autobiography as the one and only authoritative version of the lived experience, or a spectator biographer’s personal account as the single genuine truth, however amply supported by historical evidence.
— Due to my own cognitive bias which I fully acknowledge, I very rarely speak about my past. Sometimes my memory is too sketchy to allow me being sure that there is any validity in the propositions I am asked to make according to the conceptual framework my current state of mind set up; often I simply feel no need to gratify other’s curiosity of espying a great many beautiful rose in one’s secret garden by writing an Augustinian confessional autobiography which, when confronted with the scrutiny of a heedful reader, is full of unheedful hyperboles and self-created myths.
— My aversion to picture-taking in part originates from my acknowledgment of the cognitive impotency in the human brain. A photo may be a good document consisting of factual information about at what time I was at what place, but so what? How wonderfully does this documentary evidence, be it captured in a candid unguarded moment, or with staged set-up, depict my inner reality? What significance does it have if I prove unable to summon to mind a little bit of personal impression of a particular event at the sight of this appearance, at learning of this historical fact that I was at some place at some moment (knowing that I do not have a good autobiographical memory)? Must not, I have sometimes inquired myself, those who delight in viewing pictures of themselves which surely demonstrate their physiological development from early age until present days, place more emphasis on the outer reality than inner truth? In days prior to the invention of the first camera, or in regions remote from the newest technological innovation, do people who have no means to paint/draw retain less memories of their own life, or is their family/social bond weaker if they are unable to see a physical representation of their loved ones?
I question how real a photograph can be in depicting genuine events: after all, we all know colour fidelity depends on the sensitivity of the camera sensor, contour sharpness on the image resolution, and so on. Much like paintings, my conception of a photograph is not a window through which one could peer into the far away and the long ago, but a flat surface with print on it, a graphic imagery obtained through a mechanical process which condenses the three-dimensionality into two-dimensionality: in truth, the three-dimensional effect is sheer (optical) illusion. That by which renders a realistic illusion of depth and relief I cannot and need not to discuss in detail (my background in visual art primarily comes from my practise in drawing), suffice it here simply to note that such widely held notion of a photograph as one representation of reality — and indeed, one amongst many — should be more justly called one distortion of reality showing disembodied attributes and pictorial properties expropriated from the subject(s) of depiction itself. Once codified into arrays of colour information and clusters of electrical signals by which spatiality is altered under the mechanism, the subject becomes a flat silhouette of positive colour and of more or less stretchable outlines making allusion to, if not an illusion of, its original three-dimensional identity.
As for the time dimension, let me be restricted to portrait photography: can a human subject’s Being be grasped in the here and now? My answer, as shown in the lines of existentialism, is never. The photographic instant, a tiny fragment of time accompanied by a tiny fragment of pictorial details, once captured by the hands of the clever photographer, is dead; the historical instant of his own witness which he decides to unfold in front of his hypothetical spectators, is a reality subjectively chosen to be registered. I much prefer to share a friend’s current throbbing tears, thinking how to bring her joy again, rather than to look at her isolated, static smile confined into a four-side frame as was captured by the spontaneous photographic genius, lamenting that all the good moments are forever lost.
— What matters to me is not the rational experience of yesterday, but the emotional response of the present day.
— Speaking of surface meaning and unrevealed truth, I remember having seen a Desjardins TV commercial years ago, showing a succession of common scenes, each of which accompanied with a sentence ‘This is not [concrete object], this is [abstract meaning]’, and it ends with ‘This is not a bank, this is Desjardins’. This is perhaps the most insightful and inspiring commercial I have ever seen in our materialistic world.
— Pray forgive my intellectual bluntness, I do not see by what dint looking at an ordinary picture you took can be equated with holding infinity in an hour — unless it is, by the very act of capturing the grandiose design in a shining moment, uplifted into the status of a work of art.
— As Paul Klee said, ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible’, it is my firm conviction that an artist’s vocation is to reveal the reality lying behind what is directly perceivable. In my progressive, though terribly slow, growth I have nourished a vision that is a blending of reality and unreality, a mixing of subjectivity and objectivity, a drifting between an undecidable boundary that can never be drawn. What do I seek for? The fluid dynamics between what is and what is not.
— All very microscopic my analysis is to be sure, yet human civilisation progresses in the light of this indispensable dissatisfaction towards current circumstance. If no one insists upon details, no better innovation will be invented to represent the world around us with higher accuracy. A graphic representation has a fairy-like quality though at the same time it can demonstrate great precision, as in the case of modern photography.
— Decisive moments in my everyday life are better captured by writing.
— I do see the importance in looking back from time to time at what one has achieved so far, yet this probing into the long ago and the far away is a purely philosophical task — a difficult one that requires a Socratic analytical mind.
— For a creative artist, a meticulous scholarly research on the past events which the biographer had not lived is a work for second-rate minds.
— I never totally agree with Sartre’s remark on human action, often blind and violent, destitute of clear principle. Hence I much prefer Heidegger’s notion of letting-be: we let ourselves be guided by the truth of things as they are. If in the midst of our feverish drive to action we do not let things be as they are, odds are our behaviours will lead us into an ideological fanaticism.
— The day I found myself is the day I ceased to seek for my Self.
— My shadow exists insofar as I exist.
— It is by transcending my former selves that I have hitherto come to restore in me the primal sense of mystery, once lost in the alienated digital life, discover anew the contingent yet necessary connexion I shared with the world.
— Reason for being so harsh on myself: if I do not criticise myself, nobody will, since it is the general tendency of everyman to avoid speaking ill of others in front of the targets of criticism. Perhaps I am so afraid of self-conceit that, in order to prevent myself from acquiring that arrogant chivalric sense of honour and superiority over others, I have to juxtapose the sense of unworthiness and demerit together with the sense of worthiness and merit.
— Humanity is, as Kant would say, that which must be treated, never simply as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end in itself. Persons deserve respect in virtue of their dignity, their singularity, their incomparable worth which, intrinsic in all human beings, admit of no equivalent. To see someone as of inferior kind is to erode his dignity, to see someone as identical with another is to deny his singularity, to hold a pre-conceptual judgment about someone is to undermine his incomparable worth.
— There concealed within my moral judgment are presuppositions as of what human nature is composed of: the most salient of which is no doubt that my belief in the intrinsic worth of each individual. One’s worth cannot be evaluated from the without, but only from the within.
— There are times I voiced out proclamations of great ambiguity that, at the first hearing of them, might sound controversial, for the sheer delight of mocking those who like making hasty judgments before asking further elucidation of the propositions uttered. To give two notorious examples, which made me the enemy of many:
1) I think we should never work; we should all profess.
2) There is no love between husband and wife; however, there could be love — whatever it is — between man and man.
Etymologically, the noun profession comes from the verb to profess, which by its religious connotation means to acknowledge a spiritual calling. Yet sadly enough, in an age of disintegration a profession has become a specialised social task requiring expertness — in other words, a work that one is trained to perform for the monetary pay, but not necessarily for the pure authentic inner impulse toward a particular course of action, the inner conviction which, so fully and intensely lived, must be affirmed and reaffirmed throughout one’s life and without which one’s livelihood cannot be properly called a human existence. Professing is, I believe, the one and only way to direct our action into the right moral course, the one and only remedy to cure man’s evil tendency of reducing everyone into natural object in use — socioeconomical object, physiochemical object, biologicosocial object, antrhopological object, psychoanalytic object.
Un peu de français:
1) Profession: declaration de foi
2) Travail: etat d’une personne qui souffre, qui est tourmentée (provenant du mot latin ‘trepalium’: instrument de torture)
Born into a post-capitalist society, I have since my early childhood accumulated extravagant scorns at those hard-working souls whose single object is to climb towards the summit of meritocratic pyramid, where competition, acclaim and social promotion interfere with one another, making our whole vocation an endless imitation of a futile fallacious ideological fanaticism. Those who work for the multitude recompenses they can gain — security of regular job, social respectability, physical wealth —, for the pestilential necessity of earning their daily bread, for the masochistic love for self-imposed torment, or in short, for anything else than pure passion, are likely to fall by the wayside, committing morally questionable deeds.
(The more I ponder over how Kafka could have lived until the age of 40 along with a work which afforded him nothing other than tremendous hatred, against bureaucracy, against his education, against his own impotence in the face of a society deprived of proper value, the more my admiration for him grows. I who have never expected to live more than 30 years will perhaps perish earlier than my childhood estimation.)
— A brief outline of my denial of environmental influence, which seems to be of particular interest to you. The environment whence I came is a highly repressive one. Amidst the tremendous interlocking relational networks of social hierarchies, citizens are assimilated, from the lowest to the highest rank, completely into their social functions (e.g. doctors are more valuable than farmers; biochemists are more worth of respect than mathematicians / philosophers; artists, sadly enough, have no worth at all); some are privileged by their own birth (e.g. gender inequality as is in the case of my family), some are rejected since their early life by an educational system which wrongly encourages unhealthy competitions among pupils, due to a marking scheme ineffective in revealing student’s real potential (this is still common nowadays). It is a world — perhaps I should better call it an underworld — wherein lies, betrayals, inconstancy, ignorance, vanity, abound; a world so filled with philistine chatters about such mundane matters as power and money. I grew up hating it, thence passed my everyday life watching the spectacle afforded by my relatives, the gratuitous theatre of absurd for which no ticket is needed. Often I am bound to silence, at times I offered them, in passing, an ephemeral grim of ridicule.
After I had acquired an adequate knowledge of the poisonous aspect of human nature — the superficial shallowness of human thought, the narrowness of human mind, the futile pretence of human behaviour—, after I had witnessed the fragility of human bond, so filled with insincerity and hypocrisy, fierce egoism and complete arrogance, I set up myself to confront against the long-established orthodoxy, economic meritocracy, and the like system of belief which places undue emphasis on respectability and material possessions. In a sense I should be rather thankful to my biological relatives for having committed, under my eyes, morally questionable deeds so as to allow me to discover the highest moral principle based on which virtually all moral misdeeds can be reduced into one single form: to have used a human entity as a mean to an end.
Speaking in a fairly broad sense, if not a little bit exaggerated, dogmatic convention and didactic learning are what characterise Chinese culture — the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained education by which the young obeys the old, so they say, in order to preserve the social structure that makes this nation the oldest living human civilisation. Early upbringing, imbued with the spirit of totalitarianism to which individuality is an eternal foe, aims at teaching children to submit to parental tyranny by renouncing their own will and giving their soul to the elders under total obedience and self-renunciation. Since the mainstream conception as regard to reproduction is that no child is born unique, i.e. each of them is born out of a selfish purpose on the part of her parents rather than out of human love (usually for the continuation of a particular clan), it is taken for granted, encouraged by the old belief even, that new lives are destined for the realisation of certain projects especially worthwhile in their parents’ eyes, sometimes to the pursuit of the unfulfilled dreams of the elders, to the inheritance of family pride/stigma or national love/hatred. All that are intrinsically valuable to a man’s existence — his dignity, his worth as an independent individual, among other inwardly sought values — must be sunk into the dark sea of all that are socially determined (e.g. economic position, social status). Besides, the population density of this society inevitably ushers in fierce competitions, thus as a consequence, many who are taught by the family tradition that it is moral to intentionally neglect the weak, the helpless, the inferior members of the society for contingent benefit, are too doomed to become an instrument of manipulation. He who enjoys being manipulated will later enjoy manipulating others.
The reason why I am much reluctant to acknowledge environmental influence is that I don’t want to give rise to the false impression that my mode of living comes as a result of the miserable upbringing my biological relatives had inflicted upon me. My refutation of it, my quest for a set of moral principles which properly suits my temper, makes up who I am nowadays. Had I not begun to philosophise at the age of 4, I should behave as my mother, father, brother, living a life unworthy of life. Coming from a dysfunctional family, I have always thought, had it not been my teachers who let me feel very much at home in school, I might very well go into the wrong way; had it not been my friends who prevented my scope of knowledge being provincial and narrow, I might have gone as far as espousing an extreme form of solipsism (albeit perhaps still holding a form of quasi-solipsism).
— To see humans as they are, to see them in their beauty, in their simple and attractive inner nature which I hold primary before aught else, and from this simplicity human life is filled with the splendid Hellenistic light and radiancy, however dark the lurking shadow may be.
— A great many time I have questioned myself whether my choice is the best of all possible choices. Would my life be easier if I who had spent a large portion of my earthly existence in striving against the painful condition of being thrown into the world without my own consent, perversely confronting with the adults, knowing perfectly well that no change could be brought by me alone (for to achieve such improbable an end means to have the power of Zeus and the strength of Heracles), to submit myself to the pre-destinated living condition like everyone else? But oh Jesus Christ! how shameful it is to live a life unworthy of life! Having an intuitively strong moral sense, I choose to trust my intuition, to follow my conscience, to pursue a life that is lived according to my inner conviction, not to the sovereignty of the grown-ups, to act according to the principle that (I forgot who proposed it) ‘the action is essentially good if the motive of the agent is good, let the consequences be what they may.’
— Out of isolated self-sufficiency is born energetic freedom.
— ‘Une fuite‘ you said, une fuite maybe, but so what? Living in forgetfulness is essentially a bliss. I prefer throwing a critical outlook on the past over being a constant victim of it. This said, in all honesty, I don’t retain that many memories concerning what you may call, or what my sisters may deem, my childhood trauma. I may have secured my place in human history as a passive outsider to the cesspool of crimes and darkness; sometimes I even fancy, what precisely affords me a private licence to peer into the human scene, to delve deeper into the human nature from an impartial distance, may very likely be my fundamental aloofness.
— My conception of human being accords with Wordsworth’s poetical picture of a child who retains his childlike simplicity despite human sordidness: the child who, with his transcendental mind and innate power to envision the beauty of life, always finds new way of looking at old things. (In many respects, I have become a child anew.)
What though the radiance which was once so bright
William Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
— I impose upon myself so high a moral standard of both thought and conduct that, to avoid any moral dilemma, I have to live almost alone, maintaining a quiet, secluded, contemplative existence. My earthly pilgrimage started I know not why, and will end I know not where. Unless upon me is proved that a communal existence may be possible without logical incoherence, I shall always conclude my thought by quoting from Glenn Gould: ‘Monastic seclusion works for me.’
— My single life preoccupation is with truth; truth alone justifies my existence.
— Truth is that to which I devote my whole life; that because of which I can enjoy, within my specific sphere of endeavour, the smooth working of our highly intricate neural network on the quasi-impenetrable mystery of the world; and that in the light of which I hope none of us shall one day forget to let the rationalised movement of the will to conduct our lives.
(Being a non orator may be advantageous in this regard: I have not enough words to tell the truth, how can I be eloquent enough to invent untruth?)
— It is rather idealistic to think that modern medical innovations can benefit humankind. I see more importance in increasing the birth rate than in prolonging longevity. Living longer does not necessarily imply living healthier, let alone happier.
— It is a constant aim of man to sweep out of this miserable limbo all forms of suffering; and surely it would not cease to be a tantalising satisfaction could we weave into a more harmonious order all human deeds. But how realisable is the abiding socialist dream which many a sensible good man harbour in making a difference to the stability and enrichment of the modern alienated world that is ours? A hope which, when openly expressed, almost always twists truth into total distortions of some utopian ideology.
— An age of degeneration results in a medical system of degeneration: I see crisis in health care system. Remaining alive by taking drugs or lying paralysed on the bed waiting to be seen by a doctor? What a pain! Perhaps those who are terribly afraid of weaving farewell to the world will raise in stern furry when hearing my view on death, yet I feel no shame that I should much prefer to die blessed than to live thus distressed.
— Usefulness vs. uselessness: There is no guarantee that useful things will benefit humankind, for it can be used for either constructive or destructive end. What do useful sciences amount to? Nuclear weapons, agent orange, global warming, to name but three. The useless may not be as constructive as the useful things are, but at very least, being remote from practical utilities, it is harmless (the useless always turns out to be more useful than it originally is considered, though in a non-materialist context).
— I object to the idea that, as someone said to me one day when criticising the uselessness of pure science/philosophy/art, psychology helps human beings. I say: it helps to preserve human resources only. By treating persons as instruments, in very much the similar vein as Galileo studied Jupiter through a telescope, Hooke studied cell structure of cork through a microscope, any psychological attempt, especially in the post-modern society where instrumentality is in the absolute reign over all other values, ends in an inevitable reification (objectification) of human entity — the study of human nature and the scope of human subjectivity (which in my opinion cannot be studied nor analysed) is only possible by treating human as material existence.
— This world is not a very beautiful place to live — the modern world that is ours. (‘Je suis venue trop tard, dans un monde trop vieux‘, so Musset said a century ago.) I am an extreme pessimist whose world view is grounded on the claim that this world is the worst of all possible worlds (Is it not why we strive for the better? What else remains for us to accomplish if this world, as many an optimist thinks, is already the best of all possible worlds?)
— Skilled in the use of equipment, contemporary people have grown too clever in their technological mastery and their ability to (ab)use that maybe one day they would like to have the useless things back.
— Applied science (i.e. technology) has been so successful that the mere mention of science immediately triggers wild acclaims amongst the technological men living in a world of material objects, and, the friends of all mediocrities enjoying their digital life through the brainwashing of mass media and the evil of bureaucracy.
— I lament at this pragmatic approach to science, which in the post-modern world is overcast by its shadow, scientism. I am rather skeptical that human behaviours shall ever be directed on the right moral course one day.
— Maths/Art, in its uselessness, I have always thought, is above morals, because it means the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is the most valuable thing in the world, the surest of human salvation, the only harmless religion that has never induced an armed war between groups of believers holding opposing philosophical outlooks as to the ontological structure of their own beliefs.
— My existential philosophy is directed at making man’s life harmless for the entire biosphere. If one day social duty be inflicted upon my vocation, instead of contributing to the building up of a system of fashionable nonsenses, I would rather go into education, helping to convert practical minds into pursuing an intellectual activity to unworldly ends for no immediate practical goal — to train more mathematicians, useless mathematicians, in the lifelong preoccupation with proving useless theorems that are remote from practical applications yet rich in significances. The finding of applications is the work for the third-rate minds, the work that, to put it bluntly, brings the ugliest of human evils. (What has new innovative technology brought to us? Disintegration of civilisation.)
— Upon human relation I have imposed one, and only one, obligation I must never, under any circumstance, breach: that is to be true. Friends are those with whom my ideal of human relation can be fully attained, those who I know will answer a resounding ‘NOTHING’ to my unvoiced question: I have no rank, no money, no connexion, no future; what do you want from me?’ and to whom I can return the same answer when the question is addressed to me without making the other feeling useless. They are who take me as I am nowadays and to whom I can relate with my entire being.
— An ardent advocate of a form of individualism myself — I feel no shame at proclaiming my own faith — and a solitary mind who believes that we must not live for someone else other than ourselves, that we must only compete with ourselves, compare to our former selves, I see the betterment of mankind consists in the individual self.
— Glenn Gould on making recording:
The only excuse for recoding is to do it differently.
I like to shock them to the extent that from the first note they should be aware something slightly different is about to happen. I want to get their attention.
Glenn Gould
Now the question raised to me is whether I have ever attempted to purposely be different so as to shock others into a totally new awe. Thinking carefully, I do not think, at least on the large part, my behaviour can be said purposive. To demonstrate my personal difference is the only simple natural option offered to me, I had no other choice. Had I been born alone, I would not have to prove through constant affirmation and reaffirmation that I am an individual unique in my own right, distinct from my sisters, my classmates, or in a broader sense, my kinds.
— The much illaudable tendency of being different, without at all forsaking conventionality, confronted a challenge when one day I encountered someone in whom I immediately perceived a characteristic of my own. Should I keep denying that we are similar in some way, one single way perhaps, or should I embrace this happy coincidence and accept her as my twin soul? This dilemma puzzles me in the past 6 years, never for once felt quite secure in dealing with it, though at length I came to accept sharing similarities with a finite other.
— About physical contact and to which moment memory goes back. It induces in me, at the very first instant of the contact, a moment of blankness, of complete suspension of time. I seem to be remembering something, yet cannot recall anything in the long strain of consciousness. Now forced by your request to delve into that unfathomable depth of unconsciousness, I am making myself to travel back in time, and there I see, in backward motion: 1) my college classmate (a friend actually) holding my left arm to lead me, at that time lost in the crowd, into the right direction; 2) my college classmate (the soprano) embracing me after her theatrical performance; 3) a hug given by my high school biology teacher as a sign of congratulations; 4) an quick, almost unperceivable physical contact with a high school classmate; her right arm touched my left arm by accident due to physical proximity; 5) my last years in elementary school, when, being the smallest of the entire class, I was often held tightly by girls of my age, like a teddy bear; 6) my mother holding me after hearing my teacher telling her that I got 100 on a test; I was perhaps in grade 1 of elementary school.
In none of these incidents I detected in people’s gesture a malign intention at hurting me, yet I did not enjoy the experience, especially with my mother, when at that time I increasingly felt being an object of her manipulation. One possible explanation for my particular distaste — besides the obvious reason that I simply don’t like physical contact — is that being a mind person, I do not like to to be remembered that my rational mind, whose boundary cannot be determined by physical means, is confined into a finite, weak, sensory body, enslaved and fettered in a dungeon made of actual chemical molecules that can be touched, possessed, reached, studied. I belong to no one; no one belongs to me.
— I loath any form of intimacy. My slow working mind operates on absence; I cannot be, do not like to be, intimated.
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 