On Solitude: Blood is Ketchup
My tomatoes look sad. They’ve been sitting in the fridge for a while, long forgotten. When you’ve been long forgotten, you ultimately look sad.
They say people die twice. The first time occurs when your physical body stops functioning. When you stop breathing. The second time is when no living soul remembers you anymore. When you die from memory, from being remembered. I thought about those great composers. Chopin, Beethoven. Are they still alive?
In calligraphy, you’re not supposed to write the same character the same way if they appear together. My artistic director once told me, when you have the same movement twice, you should process it with different body quality. We use the word “process.” We don’t say you dance or do it differently; we say you have to process it as if you can eat a movement and digest it in your stomach. A good artist shouldn’t repeat oneself. Can you process the same emotions differently? Can you process heartbreaks differently since you can also feel it in your stomach? Somewhere there, in between the chest. How many times does it take to no longer feel the pain anymore? Once? Ten times? A lifetime? How can you feel like you’re not repeating yourself when you’re crying over the same things?
They say there are three types of death fear: what comes after death, the event of dying itself and the ceasing to be. Compared to fearing something, our ultimate fear is the fear of nothingness, our “ceasing to be”. I read it somewhere that we disguised our death anxiety in various way. Fearing of being forgotten is one of them. Therefore some of us would try to make their name or have their impact because unconsciously they’re fearing of death, fearing of being forgotten so they use up all of their energy in their life to prevent death without knowing it. What is your disguised death anxiety?
I drafted my first will when I was nineteen. Of course, it is cringy to read it now but I was nineteen. When you’re nineteen, you’re supposed to feel too much yet experience too little. By the time I grow slightly older than nineteen, I no longer want to write any will because it seems pointless. They say learning to live well is to learn to die well; and conversely, learning to die well is to learn to live well. Actually, they didn’t say that; Cicero said that.
I read it somewhere that both artists and the neurotics speak and live from the subconscious and the unconscious depths of their society. It’s just the artists do it positively, being able to communicate through their artworks with their people, yet the neurotics aren’t able to do so. They both live in a schizoid world, torn between the conscious and the unconscious but somehow process it differently.
What if we’re repeating the same pain, or when we‘re crying over the same movie dialogues is because we thought we might be able to prolong death a little bit? Because this is the positive way, for at least we’ve already found a way to process.
In my language, we have this expression of doing something “with your scalp hard.” It means even though you’re uncertain or scared, you still do it “with your scalp hard” despite the external circumstances. That’s usually how I feel when I’m on the move.
Perhaps, repeating the pain is better than feeling nothing. Feeling your hard scalp is better than feeling nothing. Because you’re no better than being dead when you can no longer process anything.
Perhaps, artists are the ones who are afraid of death the most or to go crazy. As they try so hard just to find a way to process it, so hard that even it’s worth repeating the pain again and again.
Again and again.
