It all started with an image, though one that really came into a so to speak light before it even existed. One sees, firstly. Punctum as a form or attention, filter or framing device——an interruption in the act of seeing which triggers a refraction where association is the flipping upside-down of the mirror as much as a natural stream of thought. Oh. Constantly grasping at words. Try to describe flows, try to pick up words that describe people: 散文诗人, the great essayist, experimental folk maker. One is never enough, of course——artist, writer, activist——but if i could describe to you a process instead then perhaps i wouldn’t have gone through it all in quite the same way anyway. Words destroy me, time passes, and in the meanwhile we play a few games.

It all started with a seasick steadicam. It was the bane of those first few weeks of working, becoming one of those challenges that one cannot give up on simply because you’ve already wasted too much time trying and cannot bear to let go in vain. And those many hours spent walking back and forth the third floor flat tinkering with an orange handsaw arm, PET bottle caps and various metal washers came out of a whim, really, based upon a beginner’s rereading of The Politics of Disappearance and moving around in Hong Kong. Movement, restlessness, sitting at a desk overlooking noisy Shanghai Street looking for the right troubleshooting video to make the damned steadicam work as it should. Sitting as restless as distraction, the wrong videos lead to other flows, like centripetally-spinning eggs scrambled inside the shell and shanzhai effecting tilt-shift optics with video and image-editing software.

And we continue to work within that distraction, as if the Cantonese version of looking (眱) already directed our eyes askance, the Scheimpflug principle was made physical as if we were moving throughout the city while laying down. Or seeing through a viewfinder, especially when mounted on a seasick steadicam held at waist-height. Tilt-shift is a subtle change in perspective, and your weak limb makes everything feel more distant, passive but with uncertain intention like sleeping next to someone with their back turned to you. I wonder if feeling distance from these images makes one more of a subject or less of one.

He says, “I am thinking. What if the body were not important?”

We keep walking along an overpass, and she comes to match our pace on my right, listening. She interrupts him at one point, and when she closes her statement with, “Maybe it’s an over-interpretation“, her body moves away from us while keeping the tempo.

Later while they are opening up the furled black banner in her arms, I say to him, “In principle, we should be free. But with the body there is possession. And with possession there is the basis for all socio-political conflict.” We stop at an intersection, in the middle of the street. Some people sit down.

It could have all started from there. He had warned me about getting arrested, but for all the supposed escalation it starts raining and traffic is restored. Everyone shoots images of everyone else. The three-man police film crew make a tilt-shift view, their camera perched on a gaffer pole above the crowd, one with his hands following gently on the shoulders of the gaffer. Everyone is in close proximity; the third is close behind.

She writes, for instance, “the Polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” The “true” space then lies “between the people” which means that as much as any action takes place somewhere located, it also establishes a space which belongs properly to alliance itself.

—Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street“

When you look up tilt-shift photography on Wikipedia, you will find an image of Hong Kong viewed from Victoria Peak, as if that particular perspective and reference were made for that kind of displacement; distortions require further tweaking before we realise that the spaces of camaraderie encompass kilometers and the ones around them hone in the millimeters of a lens during public conflict. Focus shifts while waiting in civic procession: a boring walk, intermittent conversation, a hand-painted sign. She asks how we can change the circumstances. It is uncertain whether or not the question is real, let alone try to imagine jouissance or our own semblance. Keep on walking, they say, there’s nothing to see here.

I told her about how your gifts are always somehow a burden. You know I’ll keep them, don’t you, all this junk offloaded over the course of these years, it’s moved with me across the continent and across the city, taller piles each time, folders and envelopes and things scrawled with HB pencil at various degrees.

But maybe this time I can finally part with something, fortunate doubles, two gifts that i already have. One about a month older, given as a free gift at a liquid nitrogen frozen ice cream parlour (fashionable sunflower or more fashionable morning glory?), and the other, just a day or two younger than yours, when I bought the same issue of a literary bi-monthly not recognising where those ripped pages had come from. I’ll daisy chain your generousity, hoarder friend, no matter how i cringe inside when he talks about change. and it wasn’t even the change which we feared, just the way he said it. haven’t you told me many times to let go?

它发生时，空气中出现了叫做天气的变化，而此时低飞的子弹仍然被叫做朋友，痛苦的时间被分解为叫日子的间隔。在那时，太阳仍然恩宠这世界的事物，让它们将偶尔的阴影交托给世界的表面。每天都有些东西掉落在我身上，我的温度改变着。温度是另一种提醒你的方式，告诉你你只是自己，而不是别的什么；它让你和周围的一切分开。那些温度的变化被叫做情绪，它们有着好玩的外国名字，但我已经记不得它们了。对于发生在我身体之外的任何事情我都没有记忆能力。我记不得该如何准确地说这个短语：“我抱歉。”

This was when changes in the air were known as weather, when low-flying bullets were still called friends, and periods of suffering were broken up into intervals called days. Back then, the sun still honored the world’s objects by letting them contribute the occasional shadow to the surface of the world. Everyday something fell on me and my temperature changed. Temperature was another way to remind you that you were only yourself and nothing else; it let you feel apart from everything around you. These changes of temperatures were called moods and they had interesting foreign names, but I no longer recall them. I have no memory for anything that happens outside my body.

I cannot recall the precise words for the phrase: “I’m sorry.”

本∙马可斯 Ben Marcus，from that literary bi-monthly, on the first, future of love（但汉松翻译）…

#今天学了什么# Realising today that we’re only speaking in colours, collaborations “no bad, only un-good”——meaning we work hard to reserve judgement, critique, oh, inauthentic observer, otherwise catty once becoming “a life-long association that would change the world”.

At the end of August, 1844, Engels passed through Paris, en route to his employment in Manchester, England, from visiting his family in Barmen (Germany). During 10 days in the French capital, he met Marx (for the second time).

Collaboration means meeting on occasion, sometimes intensively, we laugh at the easy jetset, asking lots of questions in diversion, desiring of the “tranquility of knowledge”. But that wasn’t it. This is non-knowledge, collaboration in colour, yes, Anastas/Gabri, Bester/Kishop or WoofShop, comparative studies as variations on a what, what you want, define and argue, get lost searching for the sea, in Elements, continue softer, what you want.

Would the ‘urban entropic conclusion’ require a certain withdrawal from the social, identity radii, we’re not obligated, her islands, come out only for exposure and/or discomfort. Rearrange the flat, morning study sessions, a cheap coffee maker and a broken electric stove. But it wasn’t really broken. Engage out of what you know, engage to counter what you know; they look similar, maybe, but stylistically…approach, a rationing, an investigation. What is continuity, in the end (har har har), but the careful arrangement of objects and the nice surprise that he even noticed?

we wrote twice last year. growing smaller in our livelihood. making reparations, finding ourselves present, losing words of reflection for bullshit become routine. it’s an alienating experience to observe others speaking in endless strings of aphorism and cliché, like miraculously knowing the code for things that you did not care to know about. flooded gates . cinema and the sound of air conditioning . the ballad of the broken birdie records, that was forever.

you can describe things, but you cannot tell them.

she said we made it up to overcome change, that forever . because the passing arcs of the sun and moon were just too much. the drummer’s steady hands were deceiving, when it had only been about the joy and trauma of difference that really counted . “difference and deferral” . counting . rational concepts . and a one. and a one.

like a new way of seeing something.

two, three. counting and singing again, rushing into nines and ten. time was not the matter at hand, and i could only otherwise imagine some kind of spatial parameter (cigarette, balcony, distance from one apartment to another), but of course it’s less rational than that, our descriptions are as infinite as desire. we’ll be 靠谱 one day.

it sounds too prescribed, doesn’t it——sticking to the score——exactly what we didn’t want. so instead we became impulsive, 花心 flowery hearts, the wallow, those hands grabbing at your face, fear, the sort.   no……please ask me to write songs instead, wait for that moment of forever . two times a year at least.

like the way i told myself that i’d be out of this place before the bottle of shampoo was finished, now one quarter left, a grocery list like your ellipses builds up in its stead. 1 ¥100 China Mobile phone card, a pair of leggings, cherry tomatoes, 1 residence permit, 3 apples, 2 packages of 烤面片 (cumin or chicken flavour), apricots or peaches, 2 bottles of diet Coke, cashews or almonds or walnuts (salted), 绿豆糕, green basil pesto, 2 jars of Ying’er brand salted peanut butter (yellow lid), smoked 豆腐干, avocados, 1 can of Sapporo beer, masking tape, a pair of gardening gloves, multi-vitamins, Whisper brand maxi-pads, 1 big bottle of water, 红薯干, Crest Pro-Health toothpaste, a green stone necklace found in a field, letters and wasted words. Is a list equalising, 你说, like the illusion of a history book or a series of object relations? When a pink iron is held mid-air and knowing glances cross a courtyard, a smile is word is a years-long treatise on spontaneity. it’s not a sum as much as an infinitesimal differential, the derivative of the function that realises slowness.

你说 “小气”, but everything feels imbibed, or imbued, like the lost spaces between words we cannot really understand (“precisely as a function of the differential between their positions”). Ellipses. i try to keep track of the list, and yes, sometimes it feels good to try to do something good for someone else, but it’s always hard to tell when exactly we become barbarians. Rarely is it as simple as a list of objects, where sympathy is the square root of identification, a manner of being rude or respectful. weird + polite forever, it keeps us busy …. 你说?

act 1:
the street is where it finally played out, no confining corners of a room, simply a street and a doorstep and a door. a door that remained closed. closed that night and all the nights after. closed for several years. there were a few words there on the street, an evening chill picking up, words uttered from mouths tightly locked into position, not once breaking out into smile, no more spontaneities. now i remember it was an iron. the last object that passed between us. an iron. your iron. my iron. no ironing board. the irony. an iron with no more spontaneities. all those years summed up into the exchange of a single iron. a pink iron.

act 2:
you entered the studio that day and it filled the room. eyes locked and we understood. a kind of understanding that was hard to come by in those days. “we paid people 50 kuai to cry”. leaving the party early i cycled to the apartment that night, shared by several, it was only you there, you and a dvd menu on loop, the same jingle over and over again, you kept emphasizing the word ‘taken’, ‘taken’, ‘taken’ – i guess it was the opposite of what i was getting – the other word that night ‘transgressive’ – you and bataille – he and whitman – i couldn’t do it – sorry bataille – sorry whitman – i couldn’t do it – so much for ‘transgression’ — whenever i revisit the room, you are both there, bataille and whitman, bataille, whitman and me and the king-size bed. the torrent of words finally gets me writing on afternoons alone in the house, just before the onset of twilight.

act 3:
a gallery space, half emptied out, i keep going back there, the mounted and framed photographs are placed on the floor, leaning against the wall, a few are supported by the pillar in the middle of the space, you try to get them to leave, to let them leave us behind, but there is simply no subtle way of doing it and you mutter at them clumsily, they leave, we are left, the afternoon sun is slowly disappearing, the lights are left off, we talk, walk around and shout, until we settle behind the reception counter, a chair and a wall for support, we can do this but we can’t do that, what do you want from me? don’t ask that of me! she tells me his knees were shaking all the way on subway ride back home, i was never shown shaking knees. now, i only ever meet you in that gallery space. we don’t exchange words just glances and parts of our bodies in a deafening silence, the afternoon sun perpetually setting.

act 4:
an early spring evening, i keep trying to leave: “i have a party,” “a party to go to,” “a housewarming party”, but something keeps me at your side all night, first we sit at the “less important people table” and are seated next to each other, after more guests stream in we are both upgraded to the “more important people table”, again placed next to one another. what luck! finally settling into a comfortable position we continue our conversation, your leg brushes against mine a few times, i recall her remark about “woody men”. and i can’t stop staring at the eyes. can’t stop. the whole night – no rooms here, but the chambers of eyes to revisit “an intense fiery sadness” i describe to her later “inside the palest of blue”.

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