dispatches from a typhoon

I am marooned in my apartment at the moment on account of a typhoon named Marakot that entered with the clandestine overtness of a pickpocket that might engage you in conversation while he takes your handbag. Such does one trip upon meteorological phenomena in a land with no delineated fall or spring. Walking through a park waste this past weekend I came upon a rope suspended from a tree whose end cleared the ground by 2 ½ meters. I could just barely reach to catch it. When I did I climbed to the point my friend had expressed doubt I could reach and then quickly descended. A drunk looking man in shabby clothes came over to congratulate me and told me he was a tour guide in Tainan and an authority on local customs and well-versed in the histories surrounding the city’s famous monuments. I asked him why Tainan seemed to have such an impressive number of lesbian women within its border and he answered “燒悶,” which combines the ideas “to heat up” and “stuffy.” Though I’m no lesbian, the same two words are well fit to describe my current state in this little apartment. No gaskets to let off the pressure which accumulates under our collected thoughts and desires. When I think about the seasons of this country, I can’t help but picture the old one-roomed colonial schoolhouses you learn about in history class. It might just be that I associate a lot of things with those old schools, having for them a queer Civil War-reenactor’s nostalgia; there was something very performative about schooling back in those days, the recitation of long bible passages, the dunce-cap public ignominy, a kind of civic attitude that lingers even today in quaint primary school assemblies where the children dress up like Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln and the principal delivers a stern-faced address whose authority is nevertheless belied by the basketball hoop above his head and the fingerpaint turkey prints on the wall behind the podium. I also remember having once spent the night in an old schoolhouse that had been renovated and made into a second home sometime in the past. It was on the ridgeline that opposed the hill on which my college was built to the East and though it was nearly two miles from there you could see it at night because it sat under a flashing yellow traffic light that warned cars to slow down at the crest of the ridge. When you were inside the house you could see the light flashing in from the street; there were an extraordinary number of windows and I remember thinking that this must have been a great relief to the schoolchildren suffocating in the log-smoke and bound by their puritanical creeds to look out and see the boundless fields, their order erased by the blowing wind and snow. The night that I stayed there I remember being in love and getting in a kind of strange mood after listening to a whole Janis Joplin live album. Later in the night when the covers had been pulled over the emotional extravagances of the day I remember being convinced an angry man was banging on the door, though the wind was also very strong, and that no one would find our bodies. Something of that house’s former spirit still lingered unascended in the old creaking floorboards and low winding hallway, a spirit whose moltings we had dawned and which I’ve yet to cast off. This is indeed the character of my memory, strata of bone, a heavy exoskeleton which I carry and carry until I’ve forgotten it, but who nevertheless drags a print on the ground and reflects its shadow on my surroundings, so that the real and superimposed seem to occupy the same space. Picture this for a clue: when a typhoon comes, it washes the streets clean but leaves the subtle canals and underground births running turbid. There is a severe lack of water for the running rapids and flooding streets. The orderly division of life into its emergent tropes – the workaday, the arbiter straining the plausible from coincidence, the lights and sidewalks and walls and bridges infrastructuring the pedestrians – which is the cities memory erased by an inversion, by a sudden inability of the predictable to act upon doubt welling up through the drains. One finds oneself suddenly (such did this season arrive) and nearly inexplicably gathered at a city fire hydrant competing with neighbors for a chance at the spigot, or drawing water from a pool where little children are splashing and laughing at the newly bred lunacy of their elders. Now the hapless doorman is holding a wrench, and the tall flimsy drink of water that mans the Laundry is hauling red buckets up the emergency stairs, the office ladies are giggling, emerging from the bathroom with dirty plungers and the elevator bulletin advertises a fictitious “official water offering” on the following day that one resident when asked deems “variable.” This is a modern kind of confusion that comes from approaching all phenomena as comedic post-ironies. That is, the situation is not other than it seems, but rather is as it seems and is other, the distance there is what constitutes now our common humor. If there were three stances, an authentic stance, an ironic stance and a post-ironic stance, the post-ironic would be an emptied inflection of the authentic. Having gone through an epoch of irony, a situation could never now be just as it seems, but must always contain the suspicion of it being otherwise, so that part of the content of any experience is its negation. This in short, is Sartre’s Bad Faith made flesh. Memory is the great refugee of this all-engulfing suspicion. It gathers and gathers despite all the conflicts of rationality with experience, despite post-irony, and occasionally it offers up some veritable phantasm of the past fully formed. Something clear and peaceful in the whaling tempest of experience, an oasis, a root, a perfect fifth, something to shake you from your conviction that life is a series of barely visible incongruities, that the future is the random, double-blind result of their compound geometries. There is an idea in Malthus that all of these typhoons and earthquakes and tornados are necessary checks on growing populations and that war is a kind of human created natural disaster to achieve the same end. Likewise, there is an idea in Oliver Sacks that a migraine is a kind of natural disaster of the mind to check all the wayward strainings of a modern personality on a structure built for poor simple bartering folk and hunters. If humans hibernate, and I think that they may in the way that dolphins sleep with one brain at a time, and in the way that a man can awake from a dissassociative fugue, I think that it might be for the sake of memory, to cool in the forge of an unconscious state, unassailable by the confusion and non-being of a waking life. Here in the shade of the unrecognized and foreign a part of me rests and the old things in me float to the surface, verities and old chestnuts to be gathered one-by-one.