(no subject)
NIETZSCHE WON'T EATJA
'Location' has always been a main theme running throughout the life of that capricious shade, my subconscious self - my manifestation in some pancultural realm so massive and slippery that entire cultures have run themselves aground trying to figure out just what the hell it is and what the hell goes on there. I usually omit the oneiromancy here, saving it for a more suitable place but the unavoidable yet wholesome obsession with "place" kind of creates a funny situation for me when I wake up. After hopping about from one familiar stomping ground to another, "Ontario", "Vancouver", "San Francisco", "Calgary", I am awakened by my alarm - during the brief flash of transition I must establish, with mind awash in post-somnolent delirium, just which of these places I'm actually in... my bedroom, sparse and becurtained, materializes before my eyes... my mind performs its daily miracle, putting itself together again in more or less the same way after sleep's full ego dissolution... and: "oh, right....."
What does it mean that the middle kingdom hasn't entered my dreaming life yet? My subconscious was caught by a massive metaphysical butterfly net whose borders roughly align to the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines of good old turtle island! You are meant to be here, you're making a mistake! Fling your body where you will but your soul is quarantined - the hoops one must jump through to attain a cabalistic visa make all those indistinguishable forms and lineups at the embassy seem as easy as, oh, teaching an "English class". You were never a part of this culture! You are alien to the ground - your corporeal form is too heavy but it spits your soul out!
The bloodstained trump card: but, well, it's not like I'm "from" North America...
Why here? It often seems like there is a very fine line between the inevitable and the totally random. Why am I in a hyperurban megapolis if but months ago I was a bearded and insect-eaten youth screaming at bears in the country, and but months before that I was sitting around in smalltown cafes reading Jacques Ellul (check him out, if his books are good enough for the unabomber...) and filling myself with one compelling argument after another from dozens of different points of attack about why "the city" is even unsavoury in abstracto, not to mention the horror of its many unthinkable realizations - why am I here when I could only really settle into my last urban experience after passing through the trial-by-fire panicky freakout embarassing for all involved?
Or maybe that -is- why. We can consider The Void not as an all-engulfing panomnivorous black hole but as a very dense pivot point... it draws us into its orbit, our velocity increases with every circumgyration until we are finally flung out at full force in some direction mandated by fate andslashor astrophysics. A taste of the capital-N nothing in its Canadian manifestation, and I am sent off to splatter against China's windshield like a juicy bluebottle fly. Though it knows no national boundaries? Well, duh...
QUELLING QUOTIDIAN QUALMS
Returning to the terrestrial: though I like to pretend that I can "play" the piano, the only two instruments that I've ever been anywhere near good at have been the bass and the banjo. Therefore I have high hopes for the new object I have acquired to keep me company in my otherwise empty apartment, a zhongyuan, as far as I can tell some unholy Han-dynasty combination of the two (and predating them both, as the party line goes). But a series of strings, running along a fretted neck and across a resonant body - isn't it just splitting hairs for a musician to make distinctions between any instruments which employ that principle? Save the specifics for the techies and the manufacturers - I've now got something I can fret and pluck.