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Michael Leong |
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from "Disorientations"
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from "Disorientations" Dear Abolished Subtext: Since the night of the full moon, there has been an auditory film rising and falling about the city’s school—a great evangelical babble, old recordings of a hostile interrogation, and a murmuring radiation of ink. With no respite, there has been a serious bombing of normality. Nonetheless, there was no way all the boxes of special forms and affidavits were simultaneously real and in our imagination. Or were they? As you well know, sometimes is a time of its own. So last night, gazing at the night-sky’s stars flowering in italics, we masked our eyes with a hint of hysteria, half-sleep, after all, being the most delicious criticism of reason. We muttered to you a faint but extended veneration, heavily quoting the Opacity Sutra and the Doubled Sutra of the Damaged Interstice: Is it not the voice which is sewn into the soul of the body? Is not the body the exchange of regional gestures, an instant of respiration opening in time? Such are the codes of the autumn empire, illegible and distanced in their approximate location. Such is the sickness of anonymous vertigo, of drinking the emptiness of winter without words. Delivered entirely from practical communication, we suffered an otherworldly worldliness, a sweeping sorrow of alienations. It was that discontinuous hour in which the other’s death is necessarily consummated, in which snow, curiously falling, touches the blotched curl of Yasusada’s smile. Then a pain, pure in its origins, welled up around the infantile half-walls of our vanity. Without explaining, a foreigner in mid-1960s clothing placed strips of beautiful handwritten stationary and a few lotus leaves about the middle of our home, a sort of quilt of protection against the original and unknown dampness that is still acclimating at the heart of the real. A mass of ears copied from French pornographic drawings populated the sky, receiving but without appropriately trying to grasp the full-time emphasis of Yasusada’s language. Written over the dawn in immense particled characters, the message dissolved in miles of undated light. If they were to be spoken, the names of the departed would be swallowed by some illegible narrative, mailed but never sent, yearned for but extinguished—like traces of the closest paper cut on the most western regions of your tongue. Please write to me when you can, you, the savored one—or whoever happens to be speaking from beyond the adolescent ruins of our intelligence— A NOTE ON THE TEXT: “Disorientations” collages together—and so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson's Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha literature, and Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented system Barthes calls “Japan.” |
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