Farewell, my cubicle

If there is one thing that explains the awkward feeling of living in modern society, it must be The Metamorphosis. It is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915 and often cited as one of the seminal literature of the 20th century. The story begins like this: Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and find himself has turned into a bug. Rather than lament his unfortunate transformation, Gregor worries about how he will get to his job as a travelling salesman. He is the sole financial provider of his family. Therefore his ability to work determines the comfort of his family. The more he works, the more money will come, the more possible for his family to live comfortably. Now that he has turned into a bug, Gregor feels himself is no use anymore. He is depressed. Infinitely.

I won’t tell the rest of the story, because that is not my intention. What I want to underline in this fragment of the sorry tale is the longing to be ordinary. What I mean by being ordinary is living like ordinary people: doing what ordinary people do, think what ordinary people think, and be happy with what ordinary people happy with.

To be ordinary is to be similar with others. Modern life is marked by the repressed ambition of such longing. Therefore, people work and then spend their money to buy the same stuffs from the same stores. The stores then advertise new stuffs to buy, and the same things happen over and over again. It is a cycle that only changes in names. Turning in the cycle are lives trapped in a rat race between cubicles. Terminally.

On this thought, I wish I could wake up and be a bug.

—A fuck-you-world note after a phone call from a relative. Partly inspired by FEAR AND TREMBLING (Alain Corneau, 2003)

A brief study in forgetting and remembering

Our understanding of memory often lies in the overwhelming tension between preservation and loss. We tend to reduce the everyday flow of our lives into a series of fragments. Brief passing moments and images remain completely intact despite the passage of time, but the overall framework destined to disappear, to be worn away by ageing and unknown interventions of fate. In this perspective, memory is a form of conflict, where the desire to retain the past as it was runs up against the inevitability of change. Or, a set of counter desires that seek to erase and alter some aspects of the past.

To see memory as a tug war between recovery and dissolution is to blur the boundaries between the individual and the collective, between what is most intensely personal and what is held in common. If we do so, that is because in recent years there has been a shift in terms. Memory has come to stand alongside history in both popular and scholarly discourse. We speak less of the power of the historical processes and change, and more of the fragile resistance of memory and its attempts to preserve what is no longer.

Perhaps we speak so much of memory because there is so little left of it.

—My small note on the nature of remembering, derived from some books and  AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)

Before the damage is done, I confess

I wish I could have loved you before a world war does to us whatever it will do.

—A line from Arcade Fire's song and a prayer I've been reciting after gulping down four hours of LOVE EXPOSURE (Sion Sono, 2008)