(no subject)
TEN MILLION VOICES SHOUTING 'GAVAGAI'
Dinnertime, a loose conference of representatives from various tributaries and pools of the great English waterway gathers to chat and shout for more tea. Two each of Brits and Australians, an Irishman, a Kenyan and yours truly reluctantly flying the Canadian flag... that I'm the kind of unrepentant ingrate that engages in all manner of transgressive and unwholesome behaviour like "not standing for the anthem" is, of course, a harmless tic belying this most convenient of identities. The sun, one fears, never sets on anything.
And once more it's decoding - early bursts of good-to-meet-you sarcasm and innuendo melt into more lively discourse on more variable topics. It is good to be talking to nice people, to dust the cobwebs off of the old conversational faculties in the presence of the kind and receptive - at my most energetic I am allowed the opportunity for a monologue riffing on the great fire of London, and I am met with a chorus of 'london bridge is falling down' as a jovial rebuff. Five bottles of pijiu in we're slinging politics back and forth and it is clear that with a little prestidigitation one can manipulate the flow to get everyone nodding in assent at the vague tautologies of libertarianism, meaningful because the philosophy, minus the mysticism that necessarily follows, is at its heart so stark and simple. A few well-placed "why"s, the assertion that convience is not enough, the realization that A does not follow B except in the paperwork... we know, we know.
Everyone is of the opinion that the increasing military presence in their countries makes them uneasy, for reasons ranging from my sometimes embarassing affectation of doom-and-gloom apocalypticism to purer instinct. Everyone moved to China because the threat, as they perceive it, is a little less pronounced here... or perhaps just a little more subtle, maybe, if you can barely speak the language.
Everyone has seen the monstrous human void gaping desperate under their home nations' rugs. We've all graced the crackhouses and witnessed at the very least some miserable hint of what goes on there, been accosted by junkies in droves, been ripped off to pay for somebody's fix, found compassion in contempt and vice-versa. There is an appeal to change, or an appeal to the 'system'; solutions proposed are draconian and relentless, or equally ruthless in their commiseration. What the hell do we do? How do we answer the insolubilia that have confounded people much wiser, kinder, more generous than us? "Change" is forever vast and forever inevitable... have we gratuitously changed our lifestyles just to remind ourselves that it exists, that it's this random flow that we live for and through?
One of the most accidentally prescient films ever made is "They Live", a nineteen-eighties action thriller starring the inestimable Rowdy Roddy Piper. I know very little of the plot, I only caught it in fragments from underneath a blanket on the homey hardwood of a bike-punk flop in Seattle where I was, in the parlance of the times, crashing. As far as I could surmise, squinting as I was through flat dialogue and macho sensibilities, the movie is about a guy who somehow gets his hands on this pair of sunglasses that strip away confusion and affectation from the world; looking through them, billboards all display an authoritarian 'CONSUME' in fuzzy gray Arial, fast food read "POISON", various businessmen, cops, and profiteers of misery are seen with grinning death masks replacing their human faces... and at this point Rowdy Roddy heads off on a mission using these glasses to determine who he should and shouldn't kill - heads roll, blood is spilled, wrestling holds subdue zombified stormtroopers, eee tee cee. I, like everyone else who saw the film, am only really clear when it comes to the premise.
You know what follows. When everything I see blazing before me is besmeared with oft-indecipherable hanzi, when all I can do before my zhongguohua is up to snuff is use a few cues and make an "educated" guess, do I not find myself in a comparable position? A car ad just reads 'CAR AD', whatever subconscious appeals to sex and class and power exist in the visuals are palpable but without the language the advertiser cannot sustain a direct hit. The cops are the guys in the uniforms. Someone is trying to sell me something; maybe I want it and maybe I don't. FOOD STORE. SODA.
But come on now, lourdzwaa, this is elementary stuff...
... but come on now, lourdzwaa is an elementary school teacher.