I think you should all know something about me. I have a pre-myself and a post-myself period. Both epochs are slightly useful but equally flawed: pre-myself was all perception, all observation, the world was a loose connectivity of phenomena that circled around me, unknowable. Post-myself acquired the language to experience what I had felt for a very long time, the means to survey the proximity to the Idea of the Thing without ever touching it. [The outside of the persona and the impossible imagined void of being the persona, the belief from the void of belief.] But of course, I was always myself in these instances; while I may change, the enormity of consumption, of poverty, of false-realities still rattle me to no end. Only now, I’m not perplexed and sad that I can’t rewrite my world into a certain-type-of-film (which I assumed everyone else could do or had no need of doing because they were already secure in their own film-reality); I’m perplexed because I could never enter that world, even before I was myself, and I don’t know how to help others out. My pre/post demonstration does have a point, I promise.
I love taking little trips down the short pike, finding its breaks, finding its intersections, its segues, departures. But there are six hours that can’t be accounted for. [Of course, I could die immediately after posting this and then there'd be the 3-day chunk but I consider that more accounted for than not.] But there’s a rift in the road, something I can’t cross over or get back. There’s tear in the universe and I’m convinced that that’s where my *conversion* is; and I’m more convinced every day that that’s where I am, too.
I wrote ^ and walked away from my computer for a while… I forgot that I had to say goodbye to 2009 and I’m not too thrilled right now, either. Sometimes I get caught up in the moment that I slip out of justly and minutely accounted time. This was the year that I will always remember. This was the year that I began to want to live; I began living (in the very dusty, small capacity that I can).
No, I’ve been wandering around the planet this year six hours out of joint. At least, that’s how I thought it started. Like any of my stories (fiction and non) I’ll begin before the beginning, to get into the mood of things. Two days before my Rutgers-funded trip to Cambodia began, my friend and I looked at our itinerary and found a twelve-hour gap in Korea–twelve hours on New Year’s Day in Korea and no one had figured this out before us. Cut to: Seoul-6am New Year’s morning. Last I recalled in New York, it was somewhere around 11:45pm. We landed, the mountains were purple and pink in 2009′s dewy, 12-degree mist. The bus from Incheon was round, clean, incubatory. But where had my new year gone? It was already there, but it slipped away from me–there was a TV on the bus but it was all in Korean. The letters were round and incubatory, too. There was a long line of condos-it stretched from the airport to the city, most of the windows facing each other. But I could still see the sky and the mountains and the pink orb to the east, gently rising on a day that hadn’t happened.
We had breakfast at a nice hotel, bread and jam and coffee. We took the subway. But I don’t remember the subway, really. I only remember walking up the stairs into the sunlight, it could have been any city; it was Seoul, South Korea. It was 2pm, it was midnight, it was 2009. That was it. Somewhere my life was compressed and mushed back together again up the stairs. I’ve been trying to find the caution sign in all the photos, I can’t see anything pointing to a rift in the universe. I think I was the only one.
The flight to Cambodia was non-existent. We got off the plane into a building that mocked the worst kind of Disney Cambodia airport. I don’t really want to talk about Cambodia. It was good and bad and I was more bad than good, not because I *did* anything to help or not in the token sense, not because I got drunk and pretended to be an Australian because I was too embarrassed to be an American. (This is stupid, of course, because either way I was totally invading… “helping their economy.” Developing it.)
No, because I realized my world-situation and I realized that no mural-painting in an orphanage in Phnom Phen can change the implicit acceptance, the implicit violence with which I painted it. No four-hour tour in a land-mine museum exempts me from the rich history of ignorance, of cultural relativist bullshit I played in to for nineteen years. No amount of delicately taking pictures of trash pickers in the garbage dump will make me “one of them.” The accepted NGO worker, the joke-feministing activist, the John Smith of the Third New World. I had a situation and it didn’t come printed a manufactured laptop case — express yourself! My worlds could not be separated, from that day onward. The walls and roofs were for the tourists, the tents, the rotting river boats were for the natives.
I get back from Cambodia–I sleep for a few days. I think I was detoxing from all the alcohol. And I started writing my story. The same story I work on today, and probably for the next few years. It had nothing to do with Cambodia (in a negative way, I think it has everything to do with it). But in a more general sense, it was about people entrenched in positions, in non-positions, and knowing nothing about it. To be perfectly frank, it’s about being dumped out into the world as a product, and a failing one at that.
Spring semester- Althusser’s spring. Lenin and ideology sealed the deal, I was in for the long haul. The snow was falling heavily and I sat on a bench in Brower Common for a few hours, leaping back to the opening pages every now and then. It was the first time I had really worked towards something, felt something. But summer was the worst.
I lived in the back of Cook campus. I got it. I read “The Coming Insurrection;” I was alone for the most part. I was almost fired for reading War and Peace. It always rained. I was out of joint with my friends, my boyfriend, my bed, the food I ate, my body. I started reading Lukacs, abandoned him for Althusser again. Abandoned him for youtube videos on social alienation. I could have watched myself. I freaked out and I stopped writing, I stopped reading. I recoiled and felt the warm last efforts of August. Something Big was coming.
Fall semester began. It was the greatest semester I’ve had, yet. It’s all too fresh to condense (I’m sure it’s all there in my ramblings). When I say it was great, I don’t mean emotionally. Emotionally it’s shit to be isolated, to make do with the attenuated thread of communication you have with the outside world. But it all got me to thinking, it got me to writing. I’m doing more now that I’ve ever done. Just ask Me-Ti.
When I isolate the days, one from the next and last, I can never string them right along each other again without losing the capacity of time–I mean, with every pause, there’s something lost. And those six hours, I think it might really be a lifetime.
For a while, I was really getting down about the end of the year. It has been a great one. Excepting that I love the number nine, I don’t think that I have to let it go. I don’t think that there is really much point in subscribing to years and months and seconds. (Seconds are really bizarre but I’ll let that topic slide away for now.) There is no such thing as 2009; not really. And so I don’t have to hold on to a thing that I never really believed in, anyway.
