| by: | Linda |
| to: | TR |
| date: | 26 December 2008, 5:04 AM |
| preliminary remark: | A long digressive written account to ‘complete’ the ideas left behind in a verbal conversation, in which my plan to bike across Canada was mentioned for the first time. |
I am sorry to write so late. As I said, since we parted last time, I have been pondering over whether I should keep this verbal exchange with you (well, until 18 Jan., I mean). My language deficiency so dejects me to the point that after my second failed attempt to contact my old classmate by phone, in a stammering voice, I begin to consider a retreat from my promise to call again by the end of this year. After all, I don’t feel any particle of confidence that I shall one day become capable of clear and concise utterance, not to mention that I really have no right to intrude into my classmate’s private life for a selfish need.
Being a person of principle who prefers to act in accordance with a set of properly predetermined policies, I always feel dejected, sunk into the depth of stupidity and irrationality each time I have to fulfill, or try to fulfill, what can be so justly called—social obligations. A stark contradiction, is this not, that I should compromise to reach someone by telephone (oh a modern mean of communication which I so hate)! I have accumulated enough of self-loathing in my painful process of growing up that if I should impose on me yet another violation of my principles upon which my whole system of beliefs is founded, whether in thought and in deed, I will not be able to tolerate myself. (You see, how oddly composed is a rational mind.)
What do you think? My sense of logic becomes impaired when encountered with all these fuzzy nonsenses …
There are several details in our last conversation which strike me and which I, due to my dullness in improvising a speech, did not have the chance to voice; I should like to make them known to you, by writing.
— Your remark about buying art works only when you are rich enough reminds me of an unpleasant memory I had when, two years ago, someone after learning that I had bought a hand-made magnifier at the Salon for someone else, said to me: ‘I hope it is not too expansive.’ I was unhappy, almost raising to anger, for the very reason that I did not like my goodwill to be measured by monetary value. Truth to tell, as the number of my personal encounters multiplies, so does my amazement at the sharp contrast between me the earthly pilgrim who renounces all earthly pleasures, and some others who spend (if not waste) all their lifetime in possessing large fortune that exceeds what the pestilential necessity of earning their daily bread requires. To them I say: I will leave as I arrived—penniless. No more mention of money, please.
— My curiosity about average people’s motivation to protect their feet comes from my stoical creed according to which the body is a mere necessary container to carry the mind. I praise fortitude and self-discipline, abstain from the many comforts of life and inure myself to the many (self-imposed) sufferings of human existence. My lifestyle thus leans towards asceticism, won through a complete denial of animal instincts, or at very least, they are conceded only the smallest possible space. Can you believe that I did not turn on the heating in my apartment last winter? I intended to know how long I could bear the coldness, but later was surprised by my rather unpraiseworthy and unintelligent tenacity. Our mindsets are so opposite to one another that we simply cannot understand each other.
— I have recently decided to ride across Canada alone—a trip which is more of an earthly pilgrimage. Much like Schubert’s hopeless outcast, I will soon wander off into the heart of mystery, knowing not what foolish longing drives me inexorably onwards into the wilderness. Several contacts with whoever might be interested in such entreprise led me to the conclusion that in my ever-increasing inwardness there lies no great possibility that I could bear the strain of communal life, or that I could transmute it into a condition favourable to my vocation. We all are born solitary, separate from one another in this journey: my agnostic existentialism dictates me to face our fundamental aloneness and unsheltered condition in an alienated universe; my notion of human being inevitably savours of the icy superhuman solitude of Zarathustra.
— My earthly pilgrimage started I know not why, and will end I know not where. I can find no better words to conclude my thought by quoting from Glenn Gould: ‘Monastic seclusion works for me.’
— I think I have an obsession: with purity, rigour, exactness, and above all, with truth. As a consequence, I cannot allow myself to adopt an action destitute of any clear principle, for logical incoherence brings so disturbing an effect to my conscience.
— It is a constant aim of the professional mathematician to avert redundancies, to maximise meaning with the minimum of expressions (I, for instance, never use superfluous adjectives such as good/dear to describe a friend, because according to my definition of friendship, all friends ought to be good and dear), and to not utter anything unless one is certain that it is true and worth saying. I see no clear reason why the question ‘How are you?’ should be introduced between people capable of mutual understanding. The answer cannot be properly answered by words (in my case at any rate, I am never certain of my state of being); it can only be sought through other observations. And I cannot tolerate that a sentence of profound connotation (care for another person) should be reduced to a mere social formula, deprived of all significance. My God, how meaningless our small talk is!
— No artist I admire likes labels, nor does a lesser mind such as I. In my blunt attempt to diminish the applicability of folk psychology to me, I at times acknowledge to be eccentric, yet most of the time I do not fully accept that label as if I have been seen running naked in a snowy winter. I may be eccentric in some ways, but very conventional in many others. I am certainly out of the ordinary—without necessarily being extraordinary.
— I once said to someone: ‘Friend? There is no friend. For there is no society. There is a You, there is an I, confronting one another at the immediate present, in a timeless and spaceless place where no humanly conceived purpose knows existence.’ By this I mean there is no real need to chain one another with a set of social obligations imposed by the very label ‘friend’.
— Did I tell you my lifelong motto has always been Wittgenstein’s closing sentence in Tractatus since the first time I read it? ‘What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.’ — a sentence which profoundly altered my life, precipitating my decision to use language deliberately when I was in … grade 3. I guess my outlook on social encounter matches with what Iris Murdoch says of him:
[Wittgenstein’s] extraordinary directness of approach and the absence of any sort of paraphernalia were the things that unnerved people … With most people you meet them in a framework, and there are certain conventions about how you talk to them and so on. There isn’t a naked confrontation of personalities. But Wittgenstein always imposed this confrontation on all his relationships.
David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker, p.188.
— I want to behold in another’s eyes the dazzling fire which emerges from the glaring splendour of the confrontation. I don’t want to sit in the back of a given social framework, savouring an ignorant security wrought by an assuring set of rules that forms the ugly, unmoving, mechanistic pattern of socialisation. (Remember I don’t socialise; I philosophise.)
— I am recently asked to name my qualities, a task I find immensely difficult to perform, due to my unaccountably negative self-assessment. I once made fun of our yearbook by claiming that my biggest quality is my extraordinary ability to appreciate the beauty of maths, the essence of silence, and the nothingness of human existence; and my biggest shortcoming is my no less extraordinary inability to discern the converse of these.
— Some say a man, normal and sane in his mature state of mind, should acquire a solid idea of who he is once reaching adulthood. This popular view somehow conflicts with my belief that human nature cannot be well-defined, hence a man ought to by his very finitude be fragmentary (at very least, my being-in-the-world is subject to a radical uncertainty). An artist, as is often said, ‘rich in his own doubt, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship’ (Camus), must has for his vocation the ability to discern that which appears hidden in the transcendent region beyond his narrow horizon, to reach a world beyond world through constant evolution and constant renewal of his perceptive regarding old things. How boring it would be for a writer to produce a dozen novels which all convey the same ideas about the same topic? An artist who never evolves, never transcends his former selves, never renew his perceptive regarding old things? I prefer to be in constant change so that everything I encounter, including the paltriest and the most banal of occurrences, will appear forever fresh and inspiring to me, and my mind will always be filled with ever-new wonder and awe (at the sight of the first fall of the snow, or a child’s smile, or whatnot).
— Always to be in the process of seeking for something without ever finding it, because every answer brings new questions—there in the seemingly endless despair lies the ultimate hope (I too am a happy Sisyphus).
— If ever you have encountered someone who approaches you for his/her own gratification in the field of mental exploration, treats you as his/her psychological laboratory rat, honours you a vision of who you ought to be, and if you chance to have a strong sense of the self, you would perhaps understand my aversion for social contact. I am not particularly patient, nor eloquent enough to master the art of rhetoric, I don’t feel the need, have no capacity either, to dispel misunderstanding if it occurs in my encounter with people holding unwanted presupposition about my very nature. I much prefer simple mind, pure as a child. My patience, once lost, is lost forever.
— You mentioned love and relatedness. The former—perhaps the word I hate the most for its vagueness, imprecision, lack of rigour—I never use in the human sense of the word, as for the latter, I am still trying to figure out how it can fit into my system of belief. There is certainly a range of emotional responses which I could bear, so long as it rules out that outpouring of the heart, that emotional dependence, that merging of the souls, that crashing into each other.
— There is only one person whom I want to know and whom I want to love before all other beings, that is my Self. (What can be more exciting and dreadful than the confrontation with oneself?) Narcissism? Right now I am the opposite of it and shall so remain for the rest of my life. But I do think, in order to hold a healthy relationship with whomever one may care, one needs to be a healthy Narcissist (if not the relation will collapse into an oscillation between sadism and masochism, in Sartre’s words).
— I must avow that there is an exception to my last statement. Once in my young life I did prove to be interested in someone who was other than I, someone in whom I found characteristics similar to mine, someone onto whom I eventually projected my idealised Self. The whole story, not very surprisingly, ended in a catastrophe, because on the one hand, there was a logical incoherence in my conception of the person (the Self cannot reside in an Other), and on the other, disposed toward social withdrawal, I was and still am terribly impotent in approaching others.
— I deem distance the primary feature upon which human relation is built. I keep others at arm’s length, keeping my Self at life’s length as well. How can a Self be related to an Other in a harmonious way?
— About death. I was dead, but I rose up again.
— Only one who have ever lived a metaphysical life, suffered subsequently from a metaphysical death, can realise that biological death is not fearful enough.
— If to be preoccupied with grim thoughts and dark feelings could let me have artistic gift comparable to that of Franz Kafka’s or Virginia Woolf’s, then I would not hesitate to make a pact with the Devil.
— I will not die for anyone; I will only die for myself (you see how self-centered I am).
— For me solitude, silence, absence, nothingness, and death have never been as hostile, morbid, dreadful as many people of my age complaint about (I am not afraid of death; I am more afraid of life), for I see negative truth more fundamental than positive truth. Every death brings new life (metaphysically speaking); every end brings new beginning.
— You frowned upon my mention of Robinson Crusoe as a metaphorical example of the solitary mind, as if that fictionalised context can never occur in the so-called ‘real life’. I have never been so fond of drawing distinction between what is and what is not, to be honest; the measure of reality only lies in how much fictional characters bear resemblance with our world. Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes seem to me very real (more so than Harry Potter), in the sense that I can locate them in my mind without any strength of the imagination. If in their mental exploration, psychologists should feel no qualm in using Oedipus, Narcissus, Sisyphus as analytical tools (they are not only fictional, but also mythological), why then, can we not think living alone on a deserted island probable?
— Cartesian dualism has come to be an unpopular philosophical view in the period of deconstructionism, which aims at decentralising the hierarchical structure of metaphysical thinking. Thinking antagonistically appears to be too deep-rooted in the human inclination that a number of clever minds (Jacques Derrida, the leading figure of the movement) should attack on it, by debunking the binary opposition traditionally drawn between either/or, inside/outside, presence/absence, pure reason/practical reason, body/soul, being/non-being, true/false, life/death, etc. The line separating the real from the unreal is in fact undecidable, and once drawn, it is unstable. Opposite notions are inscribed within a systematic structure in such a way that one simply cannot appear without another (wave-particle duality is a good scientific example).
— Thinking carefully, in my long soliloquy I no doubt privilege the ‘I’ in which the subject and the object converge, the self and the other meet. Unless upon me is proved that it is probable for I to live experiences which the ‘You’, who is yet another self diving into the inner depth of its own subjective truth, live, feel the feelings the ‘You’ feel, I will always be prone to fortify the sovereign of the Self by resisting the invasion of the Other.
— I like to call the human things ‘fuzzy nonsense’ as opposed to the ‘abstract nonsense’ of mathematics. Things in this world rarely sit at the two extreme ends of the entire spectrum, but mostly lie in the gray region between black and white—there is always a degree of fuzziness about where the line is located. Mathematical objects, in my view that suffered thus far a premature birth, deserve an independent existence because they are the only known (insofar as I know) objects to which the law of exclusive middle can be applied.
— You should not consider solipsism as a form of personal illusion regarding the world (as I said, there is not real distinction between the really real and the really unreal); it is a well-known, though poorly received, family of responses to the epistemological problem related to the existence of other minds. It must be said straight that terribly lacking in the empathetical ability to feel others’ feeling, I grow up sceptical, espousing one particular form of solipsism (or perhaps quasi-solipsism) which I find very tempting: that only the ‘I’ and its surrounding world of perceptions are significant to the thinking ego. I do not deny the existence of other minds, nor assert their existence (a good analog would be an agnostic noncommittal about the existence of God), since I cannot know for certain anything about the unknownable. One reason why I loath modern psychology so much is that when giving my account of the world, I am likely to be judged seriously paranoid or having moments of passing schizophrenia.
— Compliments make me feel most keenly my absolute impotence in this world, in that at hearing an assessment that is at odd with my extremely negative view about myself, I used to feel guilty for having failed to demonstrate to others who I really am. I don’t believe I deserve any compliment.
— After writing a great deal apropos of my theory of the Self, I realise I have painted a rather grotesque self-portrait. Next time I will take a break and you must tell me who you are, whence you came, and where you are going.
L.
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 